Contemporary Authors

• Tampa ( novel) Ecco (New York, NY), 2013
• Made for Love ( novel) Ecco (New York, NY), 2017

1. Made for love : a novel LCCN 2017275306 Type of material Book Personal name Nutting, Alissa, author. Main title Made for love : a novel / Alissa Nutting. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York, NY : Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, [2017] ©2017 Description 310 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9780062280558 (hardcover) 0062280554 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PS3614.U89 M33 2017 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. Tampa LCCN 2014378060 Type of material Book Personal name Nutting, Alissa. Main title Tampa / Alissa Nutting. Edition 1st ed. Published/Created New York : Ecco/HarperCollins c2013. Description 266 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 9780062280541 0062280546 Links Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1409/2014378060-b.html Shelf Location FLM2014 101338 CALL NUMBER PS3614.U89 T36 2013 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1)

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alissa_Nutting

  Alissa Nutting
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Alissa Nutting
  Alissa Nutting 2017.jpg
  Nutting at the 2017 Texas Book festival
  Occupation Writer
  Nationality American
  Alma mater University of Florida
  Notable works Tampa[1]
  Spouse Shawn Nutting (divorced)
  Dean Bakopoulos
  Website
  alissanutting.com
  Alissa Nutting is an American author and creative writing professor. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, Fence, BOMB and the fairy tale anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me.

  Contents [hide]
  1 Early career
  2 Writing
  3 Personal life
  4 Bibliography
  5 References
  6 External links
  Early career[edit]
  Nutting attended Bloomingdale High School in Valrico, Florida. She received a bachelor's degree from the University of Florida and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Alabama. At the University of Alabama, she served as editor of the Black Warrior Review. Nutting has taught creative writing at John Caroll University and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She currently teaches at Grinnell College.

  Writing[edit]
  Nutting is author of the short story collection Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls. The book was selected by judge Ben Marcus as winner of the 6th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction.[2] The book was[when?] a ForeWord Book of the Year finalist, as well as an Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal finalist for thought-provoking texts.

  Tampa is a novel that combines erotica, satire and social criticism. It claims to address double standards like gender-based expectations of females, regarding beauty and the great extent of mischief that women may be forgiven provided they are young and beauteous. The novel centres on a middle-school teacher who has sexual relations with her students. Nutting was inspired by Debra Lafave, a teacher charged with having sex with her under-age students in 2005. Nutting went to high school with Lafave; seeing someone she knew on the news raised her awareness of the issue of female predators. The book was banned in many bookstores for being too explicit.

  When asked if it was difficult to come in and out of perspective with a deranged character Nutting replied: "It was like going under anesthesia—once I was inside it, I felt like I had to make the most of it because it was so difficult to go in and out. I ended up writing in really marathon sessions, 7-8 hours at a time. After I was done each day I had this hangover feeling— my body felt a grand fatigue even though I’d been seated the whole time. It took me a while to become verbal again after writing." (Inside Edition).[3] She also explains how her publisher and editors understood that the content needed to be explicit and they didn’t ask her to tone it down.

  She contributed to The &NOW Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, &NOW Books, May 2013.[4]

  Her writing has appeared in The Norton Introduction to Literature, Fence, Tin House, the New York Times, Bomb, Conduit, and O: The Oprah Magazine.

  Personal life[edit]
  Nutting's first husband was Shawn Nutting, a tattoo artist. In 2013 Nutting gave birth to their daughter Sparrow Jane[5] before the couple split up. Nutting lives in Iowa and is now married to writer and fellow Grinnell professor Dean Bakopoulos.

  Bibliography[edit]
  "Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls" (Starcherone Books, Buffalo, New York 2010, ISBN 978-0-984213320.)
  Tampa (2013)
  Made for Love (2017)
  References[edit]
  Jump up ^

• Vice - https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/mba7qp/made-for-love-is-a-hilarious-novel-about-sex-dolls-dolphins-and-surveillance

  ‘Made for Love’ Is a Hilarious Novel About Sex Dolls, Dolphins, and Surveillance
  Lincoln Michel
  Lincoln Michel

  Jul 10 2017, 6:38am
  Alissa Nutting's newest novel is easily one of the funniest books about sex and modern technology you'll read this year.

  SHARE

  TWEET
  This article originally appeared in VICE US

  Alissa Nutting is an author who isn't afraid to just go for it. Her first novel, the brutally insightful Tampa, told the story of a female pedophile and was inspired by her real-life classmate Debra Lafave, a 23-year-old middle-school teacher who had sex with a 14-year-old student. Nutting's hilarious sophomore effort, Made for Love, is equally daring, if quite different. The book, which was published this week, follows a woman named Hazel trying to escape her powerful tech-baron husband who is downloading her memories via a secretly implanted chip in her brain. (When Hazel learns about the implant, she thinks: "Was she supposed to not look after wiping? No. Screw that. She'd look even longer.")

  There's also a dolphin-horny con artist, sex dolls with personhood, and a part-time grave sitter. Made for Love is a madcap satire—think Fifty Shades of Grey rewritten by George Saunders—and easily one of the funniest books you'll read this year. It's also a timely novel that examines the fraught and bizarre intersection between sex, love, and modern technology.

  I recently spoke with Nutting over the phone about sex-doll preferences, Google stalking, and whether or not we humans are made for love.

  Watch on VICE: 'Slutever: Making the World's First Male Sex Doll':

  VICE: Your novel has a lot to say about the weird intersection of technology and sex. What's the future of sex and intimacy in our tech-obsessed world?
  Alissa Nutting: While I was writing this book, I got divorced. So I was also very much coming from this angle of having failed at a relationship, and feeling this mantle of failure. And thinking about what kind of calibrations are perfect for a relationship—the continuum of how much sexual fulfillment you're getting with your partner versus how much you're getting alone, with or without technology. For a person alone in a room, I can think of a lot of ways that technology can help you get off. But in terms of a tool for intimacy—can technology strengthen sex as a bonding experience with a human? Or is it more of a stand-in for a human? This is something I'm particularly interested in posing as a question, because I'm not sure. I've definitely tended more to use technology alone, but there's all sorts of couple-geared devices now, and I think it's always this balance. I know a lot of people who are really worried about bringing technology into the bedroom because they're afraid it is going to be better than anything they can do for their partner, it's sort of this Pandora's Box to them. [They think,] Will this make me irrelevant in my girlfriend's life?

  There's the weird intersection of that with remote-controlled sex toys where you can kind of be there when you're in another state or whatever.
  It's funny because FaceTime and Skype are the complete ends of the binary. Because on the one hand, you use them for seeing your grandparents in rural Kentucky, and then you're calling to maintain your long-distance relationship in webcam ways. The same platform is used to get off with your partner or to check in with geriatric family members. What interests me, there are all kinds of technology things, like sex dolls—

  And sex dolls are featured in the novel.
  In the book, her father is a very anti-tech guy, so he wouldn't want the bells and whistles. But I did a lot of research into bells and whistles, and anti-bells and whistles. So there's this option, if you just want the cock of the doll. If you don't need the legs, don't need much torso, there's this option where, on the other side, it's a flat bathmat basically. So you set this mat with the cock down on the floor. That's very interesting to me. Like, why the mat? Why not just a suction cup one? But if you just want a broader surface area, right, surrounding the cock then you can do that. It's fascinating to me the ways that it teeters between super-humanizing and dehumanizing. When you get into parts, right, that begins to feel very object-related. But on the other end, where you're having these extremely realistic lifelike dolls, it's an uncanny feeling, and it's like where is the best zone for sexual experience? Is it better if your doll is talking? And it's not universal, it's individualized.

  Photo by Sara Wood
  There's a point in the book where Hazel's ex-husband Byron is talking about how, from his perspective, if you're not on the internet you don't exist.
  I asked my Lit Analysis class about how they'd feel if they had been set up on a blind date with someone and they google that person and they find absolutely nothing. Would they still go on the date? Would that be a good sign for them? Would that be a scary sign to them, like what would their assumptions be with that? When I began the book, I was in that situation where I knew a divorce was probably going to come, but at the same time I was just like, "He's going to be able to see me forever." Even if I block him on Facebook, with mutual friends, he'll always have these windows into my life. So what's the point in even breaking up when he's still going to be able to watch? That was one of the places that I really began to write from. What does it mean to be viewed and seen by this other person who maybe no longer has benevolent feelings for you? What does it mean to not be able to control that viewing? It's kind of like the sex-doll conundrum in a different way: At what point does technology turn you off versus enhancing your turn-on? At what point does knowing information stop benefitting your relationship versus starting to harm it?

  I know people who have broken up over their Twitter usage.
  I can say with so much certainly that I could not be loved by a single person if my thoughts were just public. We think of intimacy and sharing and two halves making a whole when we think of love, when, really, I feel like love is highly dependent on this intricate nexus of light-blocking curtains that you have with each other in terms of thoughts and feelings and emotions and desires.

  The novel is really, really hilarious, and often even slapstick. There's a really great extended sequence where Hazel has her fist stuck in one of the sex doll's throats around the semen-collecting pouch and is trying to get it off. Are you influenced by stand-up comedians or comedy?
  Completely. When you look at successful stand-up, dramatic comics, they are train wrecks. They are hurting so badly. I really need comedy in my life. I couldn't get through a day without it, let alone writing a novel without it. That's what writing does for me that makes it worth revolving my life around, when I hit upon a moment that's really funny where the humor is allowing this very painful truth to become transparent and shine through. I think comedy is all about pain, and that's one of the biggest impulses of laughter, just coping.

  You've talked about how part of your inspiration was Fifty Shades of Grey and the phenomenon of all of these books about poor women who get their sexual awakening with billionaire assholes.
  I find that setup gross and ridiculous. There's going to be a price. Within that power dynamic—and just knowing what's required to amass and maintain that sort of wealth—I just don't see them being someone who wants to just lovingly give you endless orgasms. They're probably going to be a little bit sociopathic and they're probably going to want you to do things that are really frightening to you. I really sort of hate that capitalist, virginity plot structure of like, "Yeah, I'm really sexually inexperienced," and then some guy with money turns you on. Is it the money? Is it the sex? Is it the love? It's America, it's all of those things. I don't know, I find it really shitty. Particularly because the inverse, there's just not that story.

  Of a powerful woman executive—
  Right. It's seen in a really, really different way culturally.

  "I think comedy is all about pain, and that's one of the biggest impulses of laughter, just coping."

  So are we humans made for love?
  I get so frustrated with myself because I want the wrong things. And the wrong things make me happy. I'm really addicted to fast food, I'm really addicted to diet soda. I'll try to go on these detoxes, and by detox I mean I don't eat Taco Bell three times a day, I don't mean juicing or cleansing or anything like that, and I'll always inevitably break down and be parked in front of the dumpster, eating in my car and wondering why I'm there again. I'm really still trying to figure out the nuts and bolts of being in love with someone. I want to be better at it, and different at it, and I want to yell less, and not be irrational. I want to feel completely open and generous and giving in terms of decisions of free time, and labor, and all of that stuff. I don't know if it's part of getting older, but love is becoming a much more practical thing to me. But I do think that we are made for love. Yeah, I think that we live in a pretty toxic society, and that there are various ways that we're trained and bullied out of loving, but that's what we should put our attention towards: How do we love better?

  Follow Lincoln Michel on Twitter.

  Made for Love by Alissa Nutting is available in bookstores and online from Ecco.

• Cleveland.com - http://www.cleveland.com/books/index.ssf/2013/07/tampa_a_novel_by_alissa_nuttin.html

  'Tampa,' a novel by Alissa Nutting, puts female sexual predator in focus
  Print Email Joanna Connors, The Plain Dealer By Joanna Connors, The Plain Dealer
  Email the author
  on July 26, 2013 at 3:00 PM, updated July 29, 2013 at 10:46 AM
  E28NUTTING.JPG
  Alissa Nutting: "We're able to see male sexuality as being powerful and violent, and we're not able to see female sexuality that way in our society. That's one of the reasons (Celeste's) character has to be so extreme. I felt like I had to write a shocking, troubling, arresting book that kind of breaks all of those stereotypes in order for the stereotypes to be looked at and magnified."
  Lonnie Timmons III, The Plain Dealer

  The galley of Alissa Nutting's first novel, "Tampa," went out to book critics with a warning printed in large font on the cover: "CAUTION: EXPLICIT CONTENT."

  It looked like one of those parental-warning stickers affixed to certain hip-hop CDs back in the day, when kids actually bought CDs. This had the odd effect of suggesting that the publisher, HarperCollins, worried that "Tampa" might be reviewed by 11-year-olds.

  On the first page, HarperCollins continued its effort with this description, again in large font: "A smoldering twenty-six-year-old middle school teacher unrepentantly recounts her elaborate and sociopathically determined seduction of her fourteen-year student in this sexually explicit, satirical, American Psycho-esque rendering of monstrously misplaced, inexorable desire that is sure to be the most controversial book of the year."

  I had a sudden vision of the publisher hyperventilating to the point of passing out, and I probably would have put the book in the no-review pile if not for one thing: Nutting is a Cleveland writer. She moved here two years ago to teach English and creative writing at John Carroll University, after getting her doctorate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Clearly, she is no E L James.

  An author doesn't have much say in how her publisher markets her book, of course, so I was pleased to discover that "Tampa" turned out to be both less sensational and far more substantial than the breathless promotion made it out to be.

  It is indeed explicit, but it is a work of serious ambition, both literary and moral. It's also laced with dark, sometimes savage humor and juicy riffs on consumer culture and its twin obsessions, youth and beauty.

  I met Nutting a few days after the book's July 2 publication date, when I expected she would be celebrating. It has been a big summer for her: Not only did she publish her first novel, but she gave birth to her first child 11 weeks before that. In the novel's acknowledgements, Nutting thanked the baby, a girl named Sparrow Jane, "who was my literal copilot for much of the editing of this book."

  But even positive, happy events rank high on the psychological stress scales, and Nutting was hitting the top of the charts that morning, thanks, largely, to the Internet and sites like GoodReads.

  "I had to turn off the Google alert for my name," she said. "I had to stop looking at GoodReads. I needed some sanctuary."

  Despite several positive reviews and interviews from the likes of Entertainment Weekly, Salon, the Daily Beast and the Rumpus, Nutting was rattled by the negative reviews from The Washington Post, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly and others, even though she had anticipated them.

  A novel told from the point of view of a remorseless sexual predator would be difficult enough for some readers and critics -- even Humbert Humbert expressed some remorse in Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita," after all. But make that sexual predator a woman, and demonstrate that her actions in seducing a vulnerable young boy are hardly the harmless, "nudge-nudge, wink-wink" games depicted in media coverage of such women, and watch out.

  "It's a book designed to incite dialogue and reaction, and it did," Nutting said, her smile a little shaky. "It's polarizing. I myself am not -- I actually don't enjoy controversy.

  "I know it sounds hypocritical, having written this book, but my authorial life and my personal and professional life are very different. I mean, I was expecting some negative criticism about the book, but still, it's a little difficult when it happens."

  PREVIEW
  BREWS + PROSE

  WHAT: Alissa Nutting and David Giffels read from their work

  WHEN: 7 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 6

  WHERE: Market Garden Brewery & Distillery, 1947 W. 25th St.

  FREE: Call 621-4000 for info

  Nutting, who at 32 looks more like 22, is tiny, with wide eyes and the bone structure of a wren. She has written, for a New York Times blog, about her long struggles with anxiety, and her vulnerability to criticism inspires a protective impulse -- an impulse that feels silly when you encounter the sociopathic protagonist she created.

  Celeste, a cold, calculating beauty, has organized her life for one purpose, and one only: the seduction of adolescent boys. She loathes everyone else, particularly her husband, whom she married for cover and for the luxury afforded by his family wealth.

  "I hoped his wealth might provide me with a distraction, but this backfired," Celeste says. "It left me with no unfulfilled urges except the sexual. Just weeks after our wedding, I could feel my screaming libido clawing at the ornately papered walls of our gated suburban home."

  Celeste was in part inspired by Debra Lafave, the middle school teacher in Tampa, Fla., who was arrested in 2004 for having sex with one of her 14-year-old students, and whose lawyer famously said that she was too pretty to go to prison. Nutting, who lived in the Tampa area during her junior high and high school years, went to the same school as Lafave at the same time, though she didn't know her.

  "When that scandal broke, and it was on the news, my jaw kind of dropped in recognition," Nutting said. "That's when I really started paying attention to the way that female sexual predators are perceived. She was really being fetishized and glorified."

  Nutting did not think about writing about the case back then, but she began paying attention, and noticing that while our society reviles and punishes male sexual predators, female predators usually get a pass -- and a wink.

  "I was kind of horrified at how many cases like this there were, and by the way that it is looked upon as this sexual fantasy for boys, rather than a predatory act," she said. "It made me feel that I wanted to take on the situation, really imbue it with the messiness and the disturbing discomfort that I feel it should have."

  Nutting went to the University of Florida in Gainesville, where she soon dropped her practical plan to study pre-law in favor of writing classes and a major in English. She went on to the University of Alabama for her master of fine arts degree, a program that, she said, was a good fit for her because it championed "weird fiction" -- the sort to be found in her Starcherone Prize-winning collection of short stories, "Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls," published in 2010.

  Finding support at John Carroll

  After collecting her doctorate at the University of Nevada, she and her husband, Shawn, a tattoo artist she has known since their junior high school days in Tampa, moved to Cleveland for the job at John Carroll.

  Bookish types may remember that in 1993, another English professor at John Carroll, Mark Winegardner, faced condemnation from the university's administration and alumni for having a short story published in Playboy magazine. Like Nutting, Winegardner was on the tenure track when the then-president, the Rev. Michael J. Lavelle, responded to alumni complaints by undercutting his faculty member.

  "I'm unhappy, sure," Lavelle said at the time. "I don't think publishing in Playboy is consonant with being on the faculty of a Catholic university." He was not impressed that the authors who had been published in Playboy included distinguished literary figures and several Nobel laureates. "They're not teaching at John Carroll University," he said.

  But that was 20 years ago; John Carroll has a new president, Robert L. Niehoff, and Nutting has an English department chairman who is confident that the university will support her.

  "I think that there are enough people who respect the right of tenure and tenure-track faculty to write what they wish to write, that I think Alissa in the end will have no problem," said John McBratney, who has taught at John Carroll for 25 years.

  "That's why we have tenure at a university, so that writers like Alissa can write what they feel they need to write, and people will respect that. Even if they don't like it, they'll respect it."

  McBratney says John Carroll is lucky to have Nutting. "She's a wickedly funny writer, a terrific teacher, a great person. She's very popular, too -- the students flock to her courses."

  For her part, Nutting says she is not worried. "One really nice thing about the Jesuit tradition is that it's absolutely anti-censorship," she said. "It very much champions intellectual discussion and taking into account many different perspectives in order to formulate your own. So I'm lucky as a writer to work somewhere that gives you artistic freedom."

  "Tampa" counts as a publication for tenure, which Nutting hopes will come through. "I'm very happy here," she said.

  No doubt this week she's even happier: The New York Times published a brief but positive review of "Tampa," saying that while it's a losing game to try to be as funny as Nabokov, "Ms. Nutting is more successful when she's exploring what's hers alone -- the difference gender makes. The seduction of a 14-year-old male student by his hot middle school teacher is culturally less pervy than Nabokov's plot; when they have sex in the back of her Corvette, it's hard not to be a little happy for the guy. So it's a much bigger leap to show that this relationship between unequals is every bit as destructive as a man and a girl's, and Ms. Nutting lands it."

  Time to restart those Google alerts.

• Collider - http://collider.com/harmony-korine-tampa-movie/

  Harmony Korine Is Adapting Alissa Nutting’s Scandalous Book ‘Tampa’
  BY HALEIGH FOUTCH AUGUST 26, 2016
  SHARE TWEET
  harmony-korine-slice

  If you like your Harmony Korine films with a side of controversy, you’re in luck. Folks looking forward to the director’s next film have had a bit of a wait since Spring Breakers landed in 2012. He was supposed to move into production on his gangster rap revenge film The Trap last year, and even lined up an excellent cast led by Idris Elba, Benicio Del Toro, Robert Pattinson, Al Pacino, and James Franco but disputes with an actor pushed the project and Korine set out writing a new script. Korrine has described that project, which remains untitled at the moment, as a cross between Cheech and Chong and Scarecrow.

  Korine revealed to an audience at the Miami Beach Cinematheque last night that, while his untitled Florida-set comedy will film first, he’s also digging into a new project, and it’s right up his alley. Per The Playlist, Korine is working on an adaptation of Alissa Nutting’s high controversial 2013 novel Tampa, which details a 26-year-old teacher (and complete sociopath)’s illicit seduction of a 14-year-old student. The book was praised as a cutting satire and criticized as a dangerous, sick and morally queasy tale. So Korine’s pretty much perfect for it.

  No details yet on when Korine plans to move forward with production, but it may be a while. Equally as interesting, Korine suggested he might bring Tampa to HBO, which would be exciting new ground for the director.

  tampa-book-coverHere’s the official synopsis for the novel:

  In Alissa Nutting’s novel Tampa, Celeste Price, a smoldering 26-year-old middle-school teacher in Florida, unrepentantly recounts her elaborate and sociopathically determined seduction of a 14-year-old student.

  Celeste has chosen and lured the charmingly modest Jack Patrick into her web. Jack is enthralled and in awe of his eighth-grade teacher, and, most importantly, willing to accept Celeste’s terms for a secret relationship—car rides after dark, rendezvous at Jack’s house while his single father works the late shift, and body-slamming erotic encounters in Celeste’s empty classroom. In slaking her sexual thirst, Celeste Price is remorseless and deviously free of hesitation, a monstress of pure motivation. She deceives everyone, is close to no one, and cares little for anything but her pleasure.

  Tampa is a sexually explicit, virtuosically satirical, American Psycho–esque rendering of a monstrously misplaced but undeterrable desire. Laced with black humor and crackling sexualized prose, Alissa Nutting’s Tampa is a grand, seriocomic examination of the want behind student / teacher affairs and a scorching literary debut.

• Huffington Post - https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/08/tampa-alissa-nutting-_n_3725369.html

  BOOKS 08/08/2013 09:45 am ET
  Is Alissa Nutting’s ‘Tampa’ The Most Controversial Book Of The Summer? (VIDEO)
  X

  110
  53

  Alissa Nutting’s Tampa has been deemed “the most controversial book of summer,” as well as a “modern Lolita.”

  It’s not all that surprising, considering the subject matter. Nutting’s novel focuses on a female teacher who has an affair with her 14-year-old male student. And Nutting doesn’t go light on the sex scenes.

  In an interview with Inside Edition, Nutting talks about the controversy, and explains why she wrote the book.

  “There’s a lot of sex but it’s also very much a commentary on gendered expectations in today’s society, and how for women, sort of the biggest emphasis is: ‘you need to be young and beautiful,’ and if you are young and beautiful, what you can get away with because of it.”

  Nutting reveals that she went to high school with Debra Lafave. Lafave was arrested in 2004 for sexual encounters with a 14-year-old student. Her lawyer attempted to defend her on the basis of her attractiveness: “To place Debbie into a Florida state women’s penitentiary, to place an attractive young woman in that kind of hellhole, is like putting a piece of raw meat in with the lions.”

  Nutting notes that the scandal made her start paying attention to the “phenomenon” of female teachers sleeping with their male students.

  As to the controversy of the book and its sex scenes, she states “I knew that it was going to be an exceptionally controversial book as I was writing it...I promised myself I would not tone it down as I was writing because I was worried about the response.”

  Tampa came out on July 2, and is available at bookstores nationwide.

• Bookslut - http://www.bookslut.com/features/2013_08_020215.php

  AUGUST 2013
  MATT BELL
  FEATURES
  AN INTERVIEW WITH ALISSA NUTTING

  In her debut novel, Tampa, Alissa Nutting offers readers the story of Celeste Price, a young, recently-married, beautiful middle-school teacher -- who also happens to be a sociopath who throughout the book recounts her systematic and relentless seduction of a fourteen-year-old student, a goal which all the rest of her life has been built in service of. Her pursuit of her student Jack Patrick never leaves the center of the book, her obsession driving every other concern to the periphery of her point of view so that the deeper we go into Celeste's mind the more we might find ourselves trapped there too, by her seductive voice, by our slowly-flagging hope that, somewhere in the pages left to read, Nutting might have left us an escape hatch from Celeste's unrelenting and terrible success.

  Readers of Nutting's story collection Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls -- winner of the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction -- already know about her confident prose, her frank depictions of sexuality, her tricky wit. Fans of those stories will undoubtedly be rewarded by this newest book, which met and then exceeded my every expectation: For all her monstrousness, Celeste might also be the summer's most compelling narrators, and Tampa is certainly among the best novels of the year.

  For this interview, Nutting graciously agreed to answer my questions about how she created Celeste, and about how Tampa means to morally implicate its readers -- an aim that I think will challenge her readers, but one that creates an experience I think no one should miss.

  I want to start by talking about Celeste Price, your narrator. Can we talk about where Celeste came from? I'm assuming you almost had to have her first, before you had anything else, but maybe I'm wrong.

  I could say that the premise came first, but Celeste and the premise are really one and the same -- I knew I wanted to write a novel about a female teacher who sleeps with an underage male student, and I wanted to complicate it as much as possible with his age by making him fourteen. This would be a much different novel if the student were a few years younger or a few years older. Likewise I wanted to muddle things even further by having her be this hyperbolic version of a predator -- almost comically so (she thinks of nothing but having sexual encounters with tween boys), although the comedy is of course undercut by the readers' revulsion at what she's doing. Basically I was interested in crafting a text that would produce knotty reactions in readers due to a mingling of binary extremes, and that mingling is what defines Celeste's character. She's beautiful but she's soulless. She's hilarious but she's beastly.

  I'm glad you mentioned the hyperbolic nature of Celeste's character, which I was also struck by: The exaggeration allows her to take on different sorts of roles, in that she seems to be both a suburban legend and a teenage fantasy version of sex and sexual aggression, different than what an adult would expect from another adult: more single-minded, more obsessed, as you noted. One of the moves I always find fascinating is when a writer uses the special relationship the reader has with a protagonist against us: I think we have been conditioned to take the protagonist's side, to cheer for the protagonist to achieve her goals. But of course, in this case, the protagonist's goals are morally repugnant, which means that we're in a sort of trap: To read on is to take part in the quest, but here we also want to see the quest thwarted. We want Celeste changed or else punished, perhaps. Are these issues you thought about? What did you want the reader's relationship to Celeste to be like?

  Exactly -- this is something that occurs within the book's characters as well: other people want to give Celeste the benefit of the doubt, to think the best of her even in cases where there's growing evidence to the contrary. I think this is something that sociopaths count on and manipulate to their advantage: most people don't like to speak up about doubts or admit that something terrible is going on; at times we can be willing to overlook or deny a great deal in order to pretend that everything is okay. So for the reader, I wanted to make that challenge a little more ultimate, and address how complicated the urge inside of us to hope for the best can be. At the book's most difficult moments, I think it's interesting to be aware of what we're telling ourselves as we keep reading. This will be different for everyone, but it addresses something very messy and essential that I think is a key part of the book -- the novel becomes interactive during this fraught process in a way that a text that isn't morally implicating couldn't achieve.

  What are some other books that morally implicate the reader in similar ways? Were there models you drew inspiration from? One of my own favorite books that employs this strategy of reader implication is Brian Evenson's Last Days: I will never forget reading that book for the first time and arriving at the protagonist's own sudden moral doubt at the violent acts he was committing, and realizing that I should have stopped backing his side long before that point. I think Tampa is probably the most implicated I've felt in this particular fashion in a long time, and I'd love to hear what other books or other works have had the same effect on you.

  That's a great example -- Last Days is an incredible book. I feel that sense of implication reading Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, which is one of my all-time favorite novels; it always gives me a complicated sense of awareness throughout that I'm serving as an audience for extended descriptions of incredible violence. I think many of the narrators in Edgar Allan Poe's short stories do this fantastically -- "The Tell Tale Heart" and "The Cask of Amontillado" are textbook cases. Norman Mailer's An American Dream and Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me are two other examples. Most of the texts that immediately come to mind for me are written by males and have male protagonists, so that was added inspiration for me to write this book.

  It's interesting that you brought up the fact that most of the more obvious examples of this strategy for creating moral implication in the reader have been written by men, as I thought the same thing almost as soon as I asked the last question. I don't necessarily have any idea why this is, and I'm curious if you do. Any thoughts? It occurred to me, just now, that the moral ground in the examples above that I'm familiar with almost all have to do with transgressions of physical violence, whereas the transgressions in Tampa are sexual. Not that this kind of sexual aggression isn't a violence too, of course, but it's not exactly the same thing, and so I think it makes for an interesting difference, a part of what's unique about your novel.

  I think it's certainly been more socially acceptable for men to write about violence of any sort than for women to -- I don't think we're past that dual standard even today. That did factor heavily into my decision to commit to writing this book. I've always felt the urge to dedicate my career to experimental and transgressive literature, and I knew there was a void of predatory female characters, particularly sexual predators. As you mention, violent transgressions are so much more common in literature than sexual transgressions -- I think this also goes back to acceptability. At its heart, America is still a largely puritanical nation. Superhero movies geared toward children can contain an incredible amount of violence and even killing, and be blockbusters not in spite of it but because of it. The most morally conservative legislators -- the ones championing abstinence-only sex education programs -- are often also the most pro-war. To me, that hypocrisy is directly linked to misogyny. The suppression of sexuality and the suppression of women's rights have always gone hand in hand. The glorification of violence and the suppression of women's rights have also always gone hand in hand. So I think that's why violent novels are so much more commonplace traditionally than sexually transgressive ones -- violent novels don't challenge or implicate mainstream patriarchal ideals in a way that sexually transgressive novels might.

  Reading through parts of Tampa again today, I was once again struck by the choice to write the book in first person. On one hand, the book probably had to be in first person to give us the kind of access to Celeste's inner workings that make it so compelling, but on the other I can't help but think of how certain readers assume a first-person narrator is the author, or at least some version of her. Like Celeste, you're also a young English teacher, etc., and I wondered if you ever worried about how readers might react to you because of what Celeste says and does in the book -- even though this is clearly a novel. What was it like to write all these I-statements in Celeste's voice? Was there a level of discomfort involved? Were there places you were tempted to pull back -- and if so, how did you push past that hesitance?

  Ha, I do teach English but luckily that's where my similarities to Celeste's character end! I know that in my case -- and I think this is true for so many authors -- writing is the place where I mull over the things about the world that are beyond my comprehension: mainly death, sociopathy, and inequality. For me, being a writer is like going to the zoo, holds the same level of otherworldly curiosity -- I can stand in front of a gorilla's cage and have just an inch of glass separating me from fatal danger, yet feel completely safe. I can get right next to all these bizarre creatures I'd never, ever want to be close to otherwise. Writing Celeste was a lot like that. She's so depraved that I didn't really worry about people conflating me with her voice in any way... after all, this is a book that indicts the narrator instead of glorifying her. In order to do that, to truly capture the wrongness of what she does, and how much delight she takes in it, I needed to show the grittiest aspects of her transgressions. For the subject matter to be adequately disturbing, I had to push the writing until I'd thoroughly disturbed myself -- that was the test I held the writing up to. And I did disturb myself, on a daily basis. I went through an incredible amount of antacid products while writing this book. Celeste is intense, to say the least.

  Can you talk a little more about the process of writing Tampa? This is your first novel, but I'm not sure anyone would know that if they weren't told: I'm so impressed by how confident and assured it seems. What were the challenges along the way? Any especially unexpected triumphs?

  Celeste is a very confident character, so I think, luckily, this makes my authorial voice come off as quite assured. The biggest challenge for me was staying on my toes transgressively -- when you start a novel with a character who's about to go too far, you have to not only maintain that crossed boundary but also push it even further as the text progresses. It's an interesting question for an author to have to ask herself: at this point in the book, is this scene depraved enough? One nice thing that did happen in the later hours of writing the novel is that my ability to enter the voice very quickly improved, to where I could sit down and immediately begin working at any point in the day. For a long time I could only work on the book in chunks of five or six hours -- it would take a while to work up to getting into the correct headspace, so once I got into it I had to make the most of it. In some ways I can liken it to flying: it took months and months of effort to climb up to the right altitude and have the writing level off and feel more automatic. I have terrible insomnia, and I have these CDs where you try to learn to hypnotize yourself to sleep at night. I was never able to do that. But writing this book I feel like I did learn to hypnotize myself to effectively work on command after a period of time. That felt nice; it was this sense of practice paying off.

  One thing I realized writing my own first novel was that the deeper I got into the work, the more other possibilities became excluded. For instance, because my novel takes place in this mythic setting, apart from contemporary culture, it couldn't comment or include anything I was feeling or thinking about current events. Was there anything similar in your experience? There's so much emotional and moral and intellectual content included in Tampa -- but what was left out?

  Well... balance, normalcy. Celeste's monomania definitely meant everything in the book had to be filtered through her own unique hierarchy, which glorifies and sexualizes anything tween and vilifies and debases everything else. I couldn't have any objective descriptions, because her obsession renders her incapable of objectivity. Where most characters could see a park bench and simply describe it -- painted black metal, waist-high, under a tree -- Celeste would see a space for a potential sexual encounter and elaborate on her fantasy instead.

  I won't try to ask you to talk about what you're working on next -- it's enough that you've given us Tampa, and we shouldn't be so greedy already for the next thing -- but I am very interested in this idea that writing Celeste eventually became automatic, and what that means for you moving forward. I realize you probably finished Tampa a while ago at this point, and are well into new projects, so was it difficult to leave her voice behind? Was there anything specific you had to do to move on? Did you find it particularly difficult to go from the final stages of rewriting back to generating new work?

  It was certainly difficult to return to square one with a new novel. I imagine it's a lot like getting divorced and being thrown back into the dating pool. I'm still getting to know the characters of my current novel-in-progress. Like any relationship, it takes time to develop. But they're slowly beginning to confess their secrets to me. It sounds silly because they're people of my own creation, but it just doesn't feel that way when I'm writing. All the countless hours I put into a novel at the beginning -- I don't exactly feel like I'm writing, so much. I'm just showing the characters I'm there and I'm listening. I'm putting in the time it takes to earn their trust.

• Grinnell College - https://www.grinnell.edu/users/nuttinga

  Home » nuttinga
  Alissa Nutting
  Profile shadow indicating a photo does not exist
  Assistant Professor
  nuttinga@grinnell.edu
  Campus Phone:
  (641) 269-4356
  Fax:
  (641) 269-4733
  On-Campus Address:
  Mears Cottage 211
  Grinnell College
  Grinnell, IA 50112
  United States

12/18/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1513653273675 1/8
Print Marked Items
What were reading
Steph Opitz
Marie Claire.
27.7 (July 2017): p59.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Hearst Communications. Reprinted with permission of Hearst.
http://www.hearst.com
Full Text:
WE SHALL NOT ALL SLEEP
by Estep Nagy (Bloomsbury)
In this fine-tuned, observant debut, the Hillsingers and the Quicks share a complicated family-line rivalry
that just won't quit. It's a chilling portrait of privilege and secrets that has us bearing witness to three days in
1964 when--as kids and adults dredge up the past--shit hits the fan.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
WHAT WE LOSE
by Zinzi Clemmons (Viking)
This intimate novel from a talented new writer follows Thandi, a Philadelphia girl with a South African
mom, who has a complicated relationship with her place in the world. Through prose, text messages,
12/18/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1513653273675 2/8
photos, and book excerpts, this cornucopia of storytelling activates all the feels.
MADE FOR LOVE
by Alissa Nutting (Ecco)
Read the title literally. As in, there is a very realistic sex doll in this book. (Spoiler: That's not even its
quirkiest element.) In an utterly weird and funny tale of a woman escaping an overpowering marriage
(think: heavy surveillance) by fleeing to a senior citizens' trailer park to live with her father, Nutting
explores partnerships of all types with an original POV.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
DOMINA
by L.S. Hilton (G.P. Putnam's Sons)
Maestra fans: The best-selling Hilton is back. In a just-as-thrilling sequel, Judith returns... to find herself
blackmailed and on the hunt for a rare work of art. If you're into the underbelly of the glamorous uberrich--
or being able to say you were a fan before the inevitable screen version hit theaters--this series is not to
miss.
By STEPH OPITZ
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Opitz, Steph. "What were reading." Marie Claire, July 2017, p. 59. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497813104/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=55a5b356.
Accessed 18 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A497813104
12/18/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1513653273675 3/8
Nutting, Alissa: MADE FOR LOVE
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Nutting, Alissa MADE FOR LOVE Ecco/HarperCollins (Adult Fiction) $25.99 7, 4 ISBN: 978-0-06-
228055-8
A glimpse into the future--which looks a lot like the present--from the author of Tampa (2013) and Unclean
Jobs for Women and Girls (2011)."Hazel's 76-year-old father had bought a doll. A life-size woman doll. The
kind designed to provide a sexual experience that came as close as possible to having sex with a living (or
maybe, Hazel thought, a more apt analogy was a very-very-recently deceased) female." These are the first
lines of Nutting's second novel (her first book was a collection of short fiction). They are attention-getting,
certainly, and the mix of barefaced candor and mordant humor will be familiar to the author's fans, as will
the deeply flawed protagonist. Hazel was well on her way to becoming a standard-issue screw-up when she
met tech billionaire Byron Gogol. When the story begins, she's trying to escape her marriage to Byron--and
hoping to avoid being assassinated by her obsessive spouse. Much of the novel is set in 2019, after Hazel
has left her husband, but there are flashbacks to her courtship--if we can call it that--and life in Byron's
compound. There's also a parallel story about Jasper, a con artist who develops a sexual and romantic
attachment to dolphins after a male bottlenose tries to rape him. Nutting's prose style is distinctive, and the
narrative is shot through with her inventive language, and she's adept at creating darkly absurd situations.
But character-building is not among her strengths. Hazel never quite emerges as a fully formed person,
which makes it hard to remain interested in her. The same goes for Jasper. And this novel's pacing is uneven
and, ultimately, unsatisfying. While Nutting borrows plot elements from thrillers, narrative momentum is
constantly undercut by back story and scenes that are odd and amusing but not entirely necessary. An
uneven effort from a terrific writer.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Nutting, Alissa: MADE FOR LOVE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491002915/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=66c3d749.
Accessed 18 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491002915
12/18/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1513653273675 4/8
Made for Love
Kristine Huntley
Booklist.
113.18 (May 15, 2017): p16.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Made for Love. By Alissa Nutting. July 2017.320p. Ecco, $25.99 (9780062280558); e-book
(9780062280572).
Hazel is on the run from the one person she might not be able to escape: her tech-mogul husband, Byron,
whose company, Gogol, is far-reaching and powerful. Hazel flees the pristine Gogol complex for her 76-
year-old father's trailer, where she is shocked to find that her father is shacking up with a sex doll he has
christened Diane. Even more problematic than her father's desire to be alone with his new, fake paramour is
the disturbing discovery that Byron has inserted a chip into Hazel's head that allows him to download her
memories every day. Byron wants Hazel back, and he is willing to do anything to get her to return to him,
whether it's viewing her memories or dropping a virtual bomb on her with facts about her father's health.
Just as she did in her first novel, Tampa (2013), Nutting pushes boundaries-this time via a subplot with a
charming con man who finds himself attracted to dolphins-and though it's not as grounded as her debut,
Nutting's second outing offers up a sly satire of our tech- and prosperity-obsessed society.--Kristine Huntley
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Huntley, Kristine. "Made for Love." Booklist, 15 May 2017, p. 16. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A496084727/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=00412abe.
Accessed 18 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A496084727
12/18/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1513653273675 5/8
Made for Love
Publishers Weekly.
264.16 (Apr. 17, 2017): p34.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Made for Love
Alissa Nutting. Ecco, $25.99 (320p) ISBN 9780-06-228055-8
As she did in Tampa, her first novel about an eighth-grade teacher's affair with a student, Nutting deftly
exploits the comic potential of perverse attachments, here to sex dolls, aquatic mammals, and technological
devices. Readers of Dave Eggers's The Circle will be familiar with Nutting's caricature of an ominous and
ubiquitous technology giant, Gogol Industries, though this cautionary tale packs the profane punch of
satirists like Carl Hiaasen. The story begins after a woman, Hazel, has fled her controlling husband, Byron,
a cold-blooded, germaphobic, and distinctly un-Byronic tech titan who "treated his electronics like lesser
wives." Hazel takes refuge in her father's trailer park home, vastly different from her former lodging, "the
Hub," Byron's sterile compound that is at once a prison, spa, and hospital. Living with her father and his
recently purchased sex doll, Hazel hopes to avoid Byron's near-omniscient gaze and forge a new,
unsurveilled, and thrillingly unhygienic life. Elsewhere Jasper, a handsome hustler whose two great joys are
"sex and conning people out of money," has a bizarre encounter with a dolphin, kindling in him an
unquenchable cross-species desire. Though Jasper's zany plot strand eventually ties into Hazel's story and
touches on relevant themes of anonymity and objectification, it never fully works. Nonetheless, the novel
charms in its witty portrait of a woman desperate to reconnect with her humanity. (July)
Caption: Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent is a vivid novel about a woman investigating a legendary creature
in Colchester, England (reviewed on this page).
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Made for Love." Publishers Weekly, 17 Apr. 2017, p. 34. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490820737/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=36f6b0a4.
Accessed 18 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490820737
12/18/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1513653273675 6/8
Nutting, Alissa: TAMPA
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 1, 2013):
COPYRIGHT 2013 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Nutting, Alissa TAMPA Ecco/HarperCollins (Adult Fiction) $25.99 7, 2 ISBN: 978-0-06-228054-1
A middle school teacher in Tampa, Fla., goes to outrageous lengths to hide her voracious sexual appetite for
adolescent boys. Nutting certainly brought dark overtones to her story collection Unclean Jobs for Women
and Girls (2010), but even that auspicious debut pales next to the unclean psyche at the heart of her first
novel. In a story that makes Nicholson Baker's work look hygienic by comparison, Nutting unleashes a
devious temptress whose acts of deception are as all-consuming as her incessant masturbatory frenzy. Our
narrator, Celeste Price, looks absolutely harmless on the surface. She's married to a rich suburban police
officer, drives a hot car, and her looks could cause car wrecks. Unfortunately for her, Celeste is also deeply,
unfixably broken. She says that the loss of her virginity at age 14 imprinted on her, and she has been
working unceasingly as a student teacher to get to the mother lode: a gig as a full-time teacher of eighthgrade
boys. In her first year, she obsesses over her chosen target, young Jack Patrick, on whom she
ruminates in the most illustrative fashion. "Something in his chin-length blond hair, in the diminutive
leanness of his chest, refined for me just what it was about the particular subset of this age group that I
found entrancing," Celeste confesses. "He was at the very last link of androgyny that puberty would permit
him: undeniably male but not man." Once she convinces Jack to give in, Celeste performs every salacious,
graphic sexual act under the sun--almost as if she is committing these brazen acts on him and not with him.
She even starts sleeping with her lover's father just to cover her tracks. For decades, transgressive fiction
has traditionally been grim, male and graphic. For those few voices asking why there aren't more women
working in this swamp, this one's for you. A taxing attempt to penetrate the mind of female child molesters
with grimy, mundane results.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Nutting, Alissa: TAMPA." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2013. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A324054841/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7cef2ab3.
Accessed 18 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A324054841
12/18/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1513653273675 7/8
Tampa
Publishers Weekly.
260.18 (May 6, 2013): p35+.
COPYRIGHT 2013 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Tampa
Alissa Nutting. Ecco, $25.99 (256p) ISBN 978-0-06-228054-1
In Nutting's graphic first novel (after her story collection, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls), soon-to-be
eighth-grade English teacher Celeste Price can barely contain her excitement about her adolescent boys; the
26-year-old passes the night "in an excited loop of hushed masturbation" while her good-looking but dullwitted
husband slumbers. Celeste's mind is as pragmatic as her body is luscious, and her patience ("I had to
regard the students like a delicate art exhibit and stay six feet away at all times, lest I be tempted to. touch")
pays off. Before long, she coaxes shy Jack into what becomes the first of many liaisons. Unlike American
Psycho's Patrick Bateman, Celeste is aware of her depravity--she fears that were she to work as a model, as
some suggest, photos would capture "a soulless pervert"--but she indulges anyway. Her bold choice of
meeting Jack at his house after school leads to unsurprising complications, as does the boy's budding love.
When Celeste's usual caution erodes, all might be lost were this young woman not lover and fighter both.
Nutting's work creates a solid impression of Celeste's psychopathic nature but, unlike the much richer
Lolita, leaves the reader feeling empty. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Tampa." Publishers Weekly, 6 May 2013, p. 35+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A329365787/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=87398d19.
Accessed 18 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A329365787
12/18/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1513653273675 8/8
Tampa
Kristine Huntley
Booklist.
109.21 (July 1, 2013): p32.
COPYRIGHT 2013 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Tampa.
By Alissa Nutting.
July 2013.256p. Ecco, $25.99 (9780062280541); e-book (9780062280565).
On the surface, 26-year-old Celeste Price seems to have it all. She's stunningly beautiful, married to a
handsome police officer from a wealthy family, and about to start a new job as a junior-high teacher. But
Celeste is harboring a dark secret: she is driven by a sexual obsession with prepubescent teenage boys. Her
new job allows her unrestricted access to the objects of her lust, and she soon settles on one--14-year-old
Jack Patrick, a quiet, thoughtful boy in her third-period class. Celeste stalks Jack and discovers he lives
alone with his father before making her move on the boy in her classroom. Her seduction of Jack is
successful, and Celeste and the boy are soon engaging in steamy trysts I wherever and whenever they can
manage them. Though Celeste is able to keep her dim-witted husband at bay, she is thrown a curveball
when Jack's father, Buck, expresses interest in her. A chilling examination of a sociopath whose beautiful
face masks her pathology, Nutting's debut is taut, sexually explicit, and utterly engrossing.
Huntley, Kristine
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Huntley, Kristine. "Tampa." Booklist, 1 July 2013, p. 32. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A338036558/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8739b34b.
Accessed 18 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A338036558

Opitz, Steph. "What were reading." Marie Claire, July 2017, p. 59. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497813104/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 18 Dec. 2017. "Nutting, Alissa: MADE FOR LOVE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491002915/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 18 Dec. 2017. Huntley, Kristine. "Made for Love." Booklist, 15 May 2017, p. 16. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A496084727/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 18 Dec. 2017. "Made for Love." Publishers Weekly, 17 Apr. 2017, p. 34. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490820737/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 18 Dec. 2017. "Nutting, Alissa: TAMPA." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2013. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A324054841/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 18 Dec. 2017. "Tampa." Publishers Weekly, 6 May 2013, p. 35+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A329365787/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 18 Dec. 2017. Huntley, Kristine. "Tampa." Booklist, 1 July 2013, p. 32. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A338036558/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 18 Dec. 2017.

• The New Yorker
  https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-deranged-comic-novel-with-a-hapless-heroine-and-a-florida-frame-of-mind
  Word count: 1468

  Page-Turner
  A Deranged Comic Novel with a Hapless Heroine and a Florida Frame of Mind

  By Jia TolentinoJuly 4, 2017

  Alissa Nutting’s “Made for Love,” more than any other novel I’ve read lately, exudes valiant charm.Photograph by Martin Parr / Magnum
  These days, in certain corners, it’s something akin to a truism that every woman is a warrior, a badass, a queen. It is, for that reason, a profound relief to meet Hazel, the passive, hapless, magnificently abject protagonist of Alissa Nutting’s deranged new comic novel, “Made for Love.” When the book begins, Hazel, who is “technically homeless,” is standing in her seventy-six-year-old father’s trailer, staring at a chipped pine box from which a brand-new sex doll named Diane has just been freed, via can opener, by her father. The box resembles a coffin that a wild animal has crawled out of, Hazel thinks. Even better, she might be able to sleep in it. I loved Hazel immediately, the way I love drunk women who instigate alarmingly personal conversations in bar bathrooms. She is the rare literary heroine in whose company it would be a pleasure to absolutely wreck my life.
  As a nine-year-old child, we learn, Hazel had a recurring daydream in which her teacher would walk into the classroom and scream, “ISN’T EVERYTHING HORRIBLE? DOESN’T THE PAIN OF THE WORLD OUTWEIGH THE JOY BY TRILLIONS?” before unleashing an extended rant that includes the inspirational line “WE TOO INHABIT BODIES MADE OF MEAT-WRAPPED BONES.” (“Whenever her mother had asked, Hazel had always told her, School is great.”) Hazel had the kind of parents who, for instance, named their Christmas tree after their dead friend Phyllis and put a steaming meatloaf underneath it instead of presents because meatloaf had been Phyllis’s favorite food. In turn, Hazel was the kind of kid who licked the ketchup off the memorial meatloaf as soon as her parents left the room. Hazel grows up; she fails out of college; she donates plasma for “drug and cheeseburger money.” Typically, she drinks “a few personality beers” to warm up before meeting people. In regard to menstruation, “unless she was bleeding profusely, she took a very laissez-faire position on the whole thing.”
  Nutting’s first novel, “Tampa,” featured a very different protagonist: a sociopathic, twenty-six-year-old middle-school teacher named Celeste, who admits, in the book’s second paragraph, that she’s a dedicated pedophile who lusts after fourteen-year-old boys. She carefully grooms her target, a student named Jack, and then engages him in a queasy, compulsive affair. Nutting’s deviant flair for comedy generally involves doubling down on a wildly uncomfortable situation or image, and in “Tampa,” this tactic often overwhelms whatever hard, awful humor is there to be found. Celeste covers her breasts in whipped cream in the opening scene of the novel, hoping that her flesh will absorb the scent of dairy, and fantasizes about chaperoning a junior-high dance and whispering, to some poor soul, “I want to smell you come in your pants.” Celeste ruins Jack’s life swiftly, and she ends up in a beach town, hunting boys who are bored on family trips and planning for the day when she’ll have to move to a city “with runaways hungry for cash.”
  At the beginning of “Made for Love,” when Hazel is staring at Diane the sex doll’s pine coffin and thinking that she could sleep in it, we seem to have caught her at a similar point as “Tampa” did Celeste—on a precipice, that is, about to tumble into total self-destruction, doomed by a certain Florida frame of mind. Hazel has just run away from her husband, a billionaire tech C.E.O. named Byron Gogol, who has been trying to implant a microchip in her brain. “Like a file-share thing,” Hazel explains to her father, as he sits on his motorized scooter and cuddles with Diane. “We would meld. The first neural-networked couple in history.” (“Made for Love” is set in 2019, to accommodate advances like sleep-optimization helmets and the “tincture of spaghetti odor” that Byron sniffs while slurping his meal-replacement shakes.)
  Byron is probably going to murder her, Hazel muses, with the ruefulness of a person who has just found out that a restaurant is out of guacamole. He has invested a lot of money in her, and running away will deeply inconvenience him. The unlikely pair met after Byron gave a commencement speech at the college that Hazel had formerly been enrolled in: her friend Jenny, a student reporter with the flu, asks Hazel to interview Byron in her place. Byron quickly suggests a six-month relationship contract, and Hazel goes off to live in his residence, “The Hub,” which feels like “where the deceased go to cool down to the afterlife’s new room temperature.” The setup, at the beginning, is not unlike that of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” and Byron eventually frames the mind meld as a romantic gesture; before he asks Hazel if he could microchip her, he drops to one knee.
  Hazel’s father, meanwhile, truly loves Diane the sex doll, whose drawn-on smile can be replaced by a handy opening that resembles a “baboon’s ass.” He treats Diane tenderly and respectfully, buries his head in her hair. She offers advantages over human women. “Every date I went on . . . I’m thinking, ‘This lady is too nice for me to die on top of,’ ” he says. “But Diane here . . . I can die on Diane all I want.” Another character, a con man named Jasper who literally screws women out of their fortunes, by engaging them in thrilling romantic relationships and then asking to borrow large sums of money, wishes that sex with his targets would “feel more like work, like what he did was closer to prostitution than to fraud. But the sex with them was effortless; he never had to fake arousal. He liked to consider himself a feminist in this way.” After all, feminists are “all about body acceptance, and he had always accepted every body.”
  Nutting gets enormous mileage out of the labyrinthine ways in which her characters redirect their romantic impulses. And she has a knack for placing moments of tender horror where straightforward affection might otherwise live. Hazel recalls meeting Byron: “His haircut creeped her out the way freshly hedged lawns sometimes did, making her feel like life was already over and she’d arrived on the planet too late.” When Byron holds her after sex, it is “more an immobilization than an embrace, like a parent putting his arms around a child before a vaccination shot to ensure stillness.” At her first taste of freedom, going for a solo drink at a filthy bar called the Spotted Rose, Hazel experiences an intense wave of gratitude, which she mistakes for “a diarrheal precursor.” At the bar, she meets a man named Liver who works as a part-time gravesitter; when they eventually have sex, Hazel likens her experience to that of a mechanic rolling around under a truck. When they snuggle afterward, it feels like “two hard-boiled eggs rubbing up against each other as they pickled together in a jar.”
  Somehow, Nutting is able to use this register of exhilarated lovelessness to extract affection from the reader in great quantities. “Made for Love,” more than any other novel I’ve read lately, exudes valiant charm. You root for Hazel the way you do for Laura Dern’s sealant-huffing character in Alexander Payne’s 1996 comedy “Citizen Ruth,” or for a scrappy stray dog. And as is true for many stray dogs, things do get quite dark for Hazel. In one incredible scene, she drunkenly crawls on her hands and knees through the trailer park where her father lives, sprays a hose directly at her face for hydration purposes, then tackles a plastic flamingo, which she hoists over her shoulders like a crucifix and tucks fondly into bed. Another day, she gets her arm stuck in Diane’s usable mouth, and screams for mercy “as though the doll were a hairless, giant-breasted attack dog.” Close to the end of the book, a woman named Ms. Cheese tells Hazel, “I hope you win your soul back in a bet or something.” There is no redemptive thesis in “Made for Love” whatsoever: when Hazel begins to gradually emerge from her chrysalis of pathos and male entrapment, she’s much the worse for what she’s gone through. Even so, the book is a total joyride, dizzying and surprising, like a state-fair roller coaster that makes you queasy for a moment but leaves you euphoric in the end.

  Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker.Read more

• NPR
  https://www.npr.org/2017/07/06/534768804/after-a-wild-start-made-for-love-stumbles
  Word count: 700

  After A Wild Start, 'Made For Love' Stumbles
  Facebook
  Twitter
  Flipboard
  Email
  July 6, 20177:00 AM ET
  ANNALISA QUINN

  Twitter
  Made for Love
  Made for Love
  by Alissa Nutting

  Hardcover, 310 pages purchase

  Alissa Nutting's plots arrive with all the irrepressible, grotesque flamboyance of a flasher at a funeral. Her last novel was the nauseating but addictive story of a female sexual predator. Her latest, Made for Love, opens with the protagonist, Hazel, arriving at her father's trailer to find him cohabitating with a sex doll named Diane, "the kind designed to provide a sexual experience that came as close as possible to having sex with a living (or maybe, Hazel thought, a more apt analogy was a very, very recently deceased) female."

  Hazel is not there willingly: She's fled the chilly embraces of her husband, tech mogol Byron Gogol, of Gogol Industries, who wants to have a chip put in her brain that will give him access to all her thoughts, "like a file share thing," according to Hazel. Byron, whose skin feels "refrigerated," calls it an opportunity "TO FULLY NETWORK WITH YOUR BELOVED SPOUSE." Hazel's story is interspersed with that of Jasper, a former con artist who had a freak accident that left him only attracted to dolphins.

  Intimacy exists for these characters only by proxy. Hazel's father has his sex dolls, Hazel falls asleep nestled with a plastic lawn flamingo, Jasper gets off on dolphins, Byron uses some sort of orgasm machine, a man Hazel sleeps with has a job as a substitute grave sitter for people whose relatives can't be bothered.

  This kind of slapstick-with-a-dash-of-seminal-fluid relies on readers finding bodies/injuries/sex/fluids inherently funny, not on the author's skill.

  "Do you know how when people are really hungry they will be driven to eat the inedible? Grass and soil and the like?" Hazel asks. "That also happens with love. If you want love badly enough, you will start gobbling harmful substitutes like attention and possessions." But the real truth is a little thornier, a little queasier; the characters in this novel sometimes choose grass over food. They use stand-ins because intimacy with real humans leaves them indifferent or repulsed.

  That's the setup, which, for all its toomuchness, is seeded with promising ideas about intimacy, need, projection, and surveillance. But these ideas are never more interesting than in their first iterations. The novel's opening is satisfying: Hazel and Byron's courtship plays out as a perfect parody of Fifty Shades of Grey, and Nutting mocks wealthy tech culture with scorching glee. (Hazel, seeing a bowl of something she thought might be something as normal as snacks on his table, finds instead "small white rocks alight on a bed of flame.") But after this sketch of lurid alienation, the rest of the novel relies on the outrage of the premise when it should tease out these conceptual underpinnings.

  If we're going to have nudes, let's make them live ones.

  Good satire locates some bone-deep but unarticulated aspect of our human experience and whips the veil off of it when we least expect it. It's like charisma — some inexplicable combination of timing and electricity. Whereas Nutting introduces an ostensibly crazy concept (sex with dolphins!) very plainly at the outset, and then simply shades in the details. Her humor is not antic, mischievous, fleet, or unexpected — just shocking. Take, for instance, the long sequence where Hazel's arm is trapped in Diane's orgasm-optimized throat. This kind of slapstick-with-a-dash-of-seminal-fluid relies on readers finding bodies/injuries/sex/fluids inherently funny, not on the author's skill.

  Made for Love has a deviant instinct that make it initially captivating — but it doesn't do the necessary other work of a good novel. For all the ostensible unexpectedness (again, dolphins), it rarely surprises. And, for all that it plays on the idea of intimacy, the book gives us little sense of why we might want it, if people are just screens for mishap and absurdist sex. If we're going to have nudes, let's make them live ones.

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/29/books/review/made-for-love-alissa-nutting.html
  Word count: 1013

  The Real-Life Reality Show That Jumped the Shark
  By MERRITT TIERCEAUG. 29, 2017

  Continue reading the main storyShare This Page
  Share
  Tweet
  Pin
  Email
  More
  Save
  Photo

  Alissa Nutting Credit Sara Wood
  MADE FOR LOVE
  By Alissa Nutting
  310 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99.

  In 1989, if you didn’t know where your girlfriend was, chances are you had to just go find her, with something analog like your legs. Fast-forward through a dozen improvements on fast-forwarding technology into the future present, barely a generation later: It’s 2019 and 30-something Hazel, the protagonist of Alissa Nutting’s smart, riveting novel “Made for Love,” has a chip in her brain.

  Hazel’s husband, Byron Gogol — a tech impresario/overlord who mashes up Bill Gates’s pioneering genius, Steve Jobs’s visionary particularity and Jeff Bezos’ ruthless drive to subjugate all minds through objects — installed the chip in her head without her knowledge. Not only does he know where she is at all times; each day he downloads the previous 24 hours of her life. No thought or act can be hidden from him, forcing Hazel’s experience of the present into a brilliant pantomime of the curated self. She’s a hostage to the all-too-recognizable work of imagining each moment packaged as the past, viewed from the future: thinking in broadcast. After 10 years as the captive, increasingly unwilling test subject in the development of her husband’s increasingly invasive technological innovations, Hazel runs away to hide in a trailer park for senior citizens.

  The book begins, and races along, as an antic thriller, through a circus’s worth of set pieces (sex dolls, lawn flamingoes, motorized wheelchairs, bestiality with dolphins), but throughout and underneath this supersaturated masquerade Hazel tells the darkest, baldest, saddest truths. Her aphoristic, hyperanalytical, deftly extemporaneous takes on love, intention, sex, childhood and gadgets are a pleasure to read and always hit their mark; they are also the interesting and entirely believable productions of a character whose self-awareness far outstrips her self-determination. She is, of course, also aware of this: “Nothing was worse for one’s emotional comfort than scrupulous observance,” she remarks.

  Like the best episodes of “Black Mirror,” “Made for Love” provokes the disturbing realization that we are, more or less, already living in the time portrayed as a couple of steps beyond too much. The continual effort to distinguish between the real and the fake has become a hallmark of this time; when Byron says to Hazel, “You’re real, and I can prove it by searching for you on the internet,” Hazel responds, “I am having a different reality from the internet’s reality.” That’s as sound a description of the modern era as one is likely to come by in contemporary literary fiction.

  If a novel’s mandate is to bottle and exhibit the zeitgeist through character in a way that is, well, novel, Nutting, the author of “Tampa,” goes for it, all out, à la David Foster Wallace, and romanticizes nothing, à la David Foster Wallace: not marriage, not love, not family, not sex, especially not technology — and definitely not finding one’s way in the world, since many people, she realizes, don’t. Hazel is rudderless, ordinary, passive; all the more impressive, then, is Nutting’s creation of a compelling, wholly sympathetic character from such a beige moral blob.

  Photo

  Porpoising in and out of Hazel’s story is the tragicomic tale of Jasper, an individual as motorized as Hazel is defunct. Jasper uses his Aryan-Jesusy looks and meticulously cultivated sexual skills to con women out of large sums of money, until his sexual orientation is forcibly rewired from human/female to dolphin/any. As Hazel tries to escape her spouse and Jasper tries to fix himself, the entire pageant of the here and now is called up for inspection. What is the surveillance state? How did we all come to be living so completely inside it, so fast, and without our consent? How is life happening in the mind, through perceptions, thoughts, the incessant synthesizing of experiential data that defines consciousness, and also happening in the body, which is always needing and always dying? How can a regular overstimulated and underactualized person survive in this reality show that has so clearly jumped the shark?

  “Made for Love” crackles and satisfies by all its own weird rules, subversively inventing delight where none should exist. How can a book be so bright, and so dark?

  Merritt Tierce is the author of the novel “Love Me Back.”

  A version of this review appears in print on September 3, 2017, on Page BR17 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Hostage to the Present. Today's Paper|Subscribe

  Continue reading the main story
  Buy
  Made for Love
  Alissa Nutting
  We earn an affiliate commission with each book purchase, which helps support our journalism at The New York Times.

  RELATED COVERAGE

  Alissa Nutting’s ‘Tampa,’ and More JULY 24, 2013

  Probing Brain’s Depth, Trying to Aid Memory JULY 9, 2014

  PULSE OF THE PEOPLE
  Building a Better Human With Science? The Public Says, No Thanks JULY 26, 2016
  TRENDING

  Deliverance From 27,000 Feet

  Amtrak Derailment Leaves at Least 3 Dead in Washington State, Officials Say

  Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program

  Trump Nominee Withdraws in Latest Judicial Setback for White House

  Op-Ed Columnist: Passing Through to Corruption

  Rebelling Republican Suburbs Offer Democrats Path to House Control

  What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World

  Corker Says He Faced ‘Tough’ Decision in Supporting Republican Tax Bill

  Editorial: Tax Bill Lets Trump and Republicans Feather Their Own Nests

  Tax Bill Calculator: Will Your Taxes Go Up or Down?
  View More Trending Stories »

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/meld-with-me-on-alissa-nuttings-made-for-love/#!
  Word count: 1298

  “Meld with Me?”: On Alissa Nutting’s “Made for Love”
  By J. T. Price

  24 0 1

  JULY 11, 2017

  MANIPULATIVE PEOPLE and sexual absurdity do much to color the horizon of Alissa Nutting’s second novel, Made for Love, almost as if there is some kind of correspondence between these two categories of phenomena. Does the emotional caginess required to treat fellow humans as playthings, in every sense fit to be toyed with, necessarily go hand-in-hand, or, um, protuberance-in-orifice, with spastic, anomalous liaisons? The earnest, young, conscience-ensnared couple of David Foster Wallace’s “Good People,” still as pillars on the riverbank as they debate the possibility of an abortion, are about as far from this novel as humanly imaginable — and yet, like Wallace, or for that matter George Saunders or Nell Zink or even Charlie Kaufman, Nutting has taken here a turn toward the riotously askew. Not simply with respect to the behavior of her protagonists (who have at least some affinity with the sociopathic misadventures of her earlier antihero in debut novel Tampa), but with respect to the rendering of the reality they occupy. In Nutting’s future dystopia, things get lurid fast.

  How far in the future, you want to know? Well, late 2019. The date figures as just one more joke in Made for Love’s nonstop antic capering; this is a dystopia so jaw-droppingly prescient as to transpire not two years from today, ha! A Florida-esque locale where the wealthy can acquire health-scanning sleep helmets; tiny drone insects carry out corporate surveillance; an inadvertent aquatic rescue video uploaded online leads to unwanted global celebrity status; and a sitcom “about a horny single mother who ran a secret yoga studio […] each night [where] the only moves and positions she taught were ones adapted to allow for autocunnilingus” serves to distract from a woman’s loneliness.

  That woman, Hazel, who never thought she’d amount to anything special before entering a partnership — or more accurately, devil’s bargain — with Bryon Gogol, the eponymous owner of a world-blanketing tech firm, has fled her former life at story’s open following a request that she agree to place a microchip in her brain. The better for Bryon to experience everything she does, says, and thinks as a hit of pure information: “Instead of telling me what you like,” he entreats her, “let me monitor your arousal levels via digital-pulse read-out.” Meanwhile, Jasper, a seasoned conman who seduces then defrauds vulnerable but well-to-do single women, has a singular oceanside encounter with a confused dolphin, which infects his libido like a self-replicating computer virus.

  What do these two strands have to do with each other? You can probably guess the general contours, if not the comic particulars. Thematic resonances notwithstanding, Nutting doesn’t bring it all together until the novel’s 300 pages are nearly up, by way of a Jasper ex machina. Not to worry, though — the shambolic, strings-showing style is part of Made for Love’s deranged charm, a sort of radical transparency between author and reader that says, as long as you’re someone who delights in this brand of pleasant experience, let’s not make a big deal about fine-toothed structure. Call it a literary come-on; call it, moving fast. It’s right there on the cover, after all, which looks like nothing so much as a boutique rum label, or an advertisement for an island weekend, the memory of which you hope will warm your chilly office upon return.

  The truth is tech mogul Bryon’s desire to download runaway wife Hazel’s every intimate detail may not be so different from the reader’s, a similarity that Nutting plays to the hilt: “Hazel went into the diner’s bathroom and decided to practice the speech she’d give Byron […] ‘I’m sorry I didn’t fall in love with you,’ she said to her reflection in the mirror. ‘I tried to.’” Naturally, this is an act she performs in anticipation of the moment when he will receive her undiluted thoughts.

  So, the shambolic tilt of Nutting’s story functions as a sly wink or a tongue-firmly-in-cheek. See the very first scene when Hazel seeks shelter at the trailer home of her widowed father, only to walk in on his just having unboxed a sex doll he has insistently named Diane and for whose purpose he shows no shame. With a daughter supposedly in blissful marriage to a tech mogul, he only means to make the most of a modest retirement. “Hazel! She’s not trying to be your mother,” he scolds when his daughter chides him. Looking around her father’s house, Hazel thinks about “how different her life might be if she’d been raised by people who knew wallpaper could make a difference and proved it.”

  If there was any question of Nutting’s intention with scandal-in-a-box Tampa (“In order to achieve satire,” author Sarah Churchwell wrote of that novel in the Guardian, “a writer must also be funny”), Made for Love makes its intent explicit, as this most thoroughly modern yarn ends with the old-fashioned gesture of a stated lesson. Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine might more memorably spoof the media/consumer interface, and Helen Phillips’s The Beautiful Bureaucrat (which features, like Made for Love, a deft executive assistant named with an absurdist spin on “Tiffany”) may well feature finer prose. And, yes, Nutting’s novel both showcases and epitomizes a working definition of hot mess — but with this novel there can be no disputing that she is funny as hell. Her insights will land close to the heart for those who may or may not have elevated a fetish for control over and above that of genuine human expression: “When had she so internalized the feeling that if something wasn’t great she needed bridge the gap between reality and idealism with her own manufactured enthusiasm?”

  Throughout the story, Nutting favors a funny type of language game to relay her protagonist’s abrupt and recent estrangement from web-immersed consciousness. These semi-odd word pairings suggest a widely recognized concept — like public rollout, manufactured home, or romantic love — but aren’t quite. Or maybe they are to Hazel, or at least she wants them to be, as she endeavors to escape the cypher Bryon’s vacuum clutches. (See, I did one myself.) Examples include, “her nonrecorded nudity,” “a tangible existence,” the “vigor killing [of a threatening insect],” someone’s “secret-joke name,” and advance to such spiffy combos as “gentrification elixirs,” “sympathy buying,” “empathy puberty,” “sovereign competence,” “experience crust,” “weird manure prairie,” and “guilt statue.” In context, each of these registers clearly enough with a certain comic edge and yet they also wobble on a precipice between meaning and non-meaning — repeated echoes of Hazel’s fits of fancy and yearning to give figurative shape to her experience. It’s the same instinct that led her into marriage with Bryon in the first place.

  Made for Love is that echo writ large, a last-ditch romp — or is it a crash? — for two people whose deception of others has led them down dark pathways from which they yearn to break out into the light of day once more. If only the web would let them! Says Hazel, emotionally at sea: “I am having a different reality from the Internet’s reality.”

  ¤

  J. T. Price’s fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New England Review, Post Road Magazine, Joyland, The Brooklyn Rail, CONSTRUCTION Magazine, Opium Magazine, and elsewhere. He has published essays, reviews, and interviews with BOMB Magazine, The Scofield, and The Millions.

• The Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2017/06/made-for-love-by-alissa-nutting/
  Word count: 1840

  GOGOL MEETS GOOGLE: MADE FOR LOVE BY ALISSA NUTTING
  REVIEWED BY NINA RENATA ARON

  June 29th, 2017

  “The absurd has as many shades and degrees as the tragic has,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov about Nikolai Gogol in his idiosyncratic 1944 biography of the writer. “In Gogol’s case,” he continued, “it borders upon the latter. It would be wrong to assert that Gogol placed his characters in absurd situations. You cannot place a man in an absurd situation if the whole world he lives in is absurd.”

  Hazel Green, the protagonist of Made for Love, Alissa Nutting’s hilarious, madcap second novel, lives in the absurd world of Gogol Industries, a ubiquitous, privacy-shattering tech behemoth run by Byron Gogol, her husband. (Sure, it also sounds like Google, but it’s Gogol, and certainly not an accident.)

  In the opening pages of the book, Hazel has left Byron and his sterile, stultifying “futureworld”—he wanted to “mild meld” with her by implanting a chip in her brain—and has decamped to her father’s house, a unit in a senior citizen’s trailer park, where she is not altogether welcome. Her father is delighted to see her, but stunned when she announces she has voluntarily exited the elite orbit of her billionaire spouse. He challenges her decision with wildly insensitive questions and exclamations like “Do you know how much money Byron has?” and “I don’t see any bruises on you!” He then encourages her to lower her standards for happiness, particularly considering a tough economy in which, he warns, she is “too old to compete with ‘intern cute.’”

  But her father’s incredulity at Hazel’s leaving her marriage is only one facet of his reluctance to let her move in. The other, more important reason he wants his privacy is that, though widowed only a year, he has fallen breathlessly in love with Diane, a life-size, lifelike red-haired sex doll to whom he plans to devote his remaining days on earth. (Spoiler: he adds a second doll, Roxy, to the mix halfway through the book.)

  Hazel’s confrontation with her father’s geriatric—but enthusiastic—sexuality is the novel’s great gift. Encounters with parental desire are notoriously, timelessly cringeworthy, but some of us are fated to have more of them than others. For me, the awkward details of Hazel’s interactions with the happy couple were all too familiar, recalling any number of never-ending, fake-smiling brunches with my own dad’s latest love interest. Hazel’s father cracks jokes about their “honeymoon phase,” gives the doll playful bites on the earlobe, and rides around in his motorized scooter with Diane on his lap, the speed “just fast enough to make [her] long red hair flow back in the breeze.” All the while, Hazel is mesmerized by the “aesthetically energizing” quality of the doll’s enormous rack.

  Nutting deftly illustrates the uncanny creep of the technological into the realm of affect, but what’s truly creepy is how ordinary it all comes to seem. Hazel finds herself unwittingly humanizing the doll, feeling “instinctually moved” to catch her when she falls. Carrying Diane to bed one day for a “nap,” Hazel finds that “if she gave it the right context, it actually wasn’t hard to think of Diane as human; Diane was a friend who’d had way too much to drink, and now Hazel was helping her to her room.”

  One thinks of Ryan Gosling looking expectantly at Bianca, the sex doll his character is in love with in the 2007 film Lars and the Real Girl. His family and fellow townspeople display an eerie patience as he explains that Bianca is a “missionary” (har har) with “nursing training.” But Lars and the Real Girl, in the words of New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, is “a story about innocence, not sad sacks having their weird way with artificial vaginas.”

  Not so in Nutting’s universe. There are many suggestions of actual copulation, though we are spared having to witness them. At one point, Hazel even gets her arm stuck in Diane’s mouth hole, the “empty stocking” of which looked like “a prototype of a synthetic digestive organ.” Nutting, after all, is best known for her absolutely filthy 2013 debut, Tampa, which loosely fictionalized the story of hottie Florida high school teacher Debra Lafave, who slept with a fourteen-year-old male student. (It will soon be a Harmony Korine movie.) She isn’t one to shy away from sex or discomfort.

  Touchingly, however, the verisimilitude of these scenes involving her father and Diane lies in the complexity of Hazel’s own feelings. In navigating her manifold, often simultaneous emotional responses—disgust, disapproval, curiosity, pride, annoyance—Nutting lays bare the strange intensity and intimacy of the familial bond. New love has been mailed to her father in a coffin-like box, and his giddiness is contagious. In spite of herself, Hazel is happy for her him.

  Hazel is likable, mostly because she’s cynical and funny, and is propelling herself instinctively toward a more honest life. But she lacks depth. Her issues with Byron, for example—despite his CEO status and the locked-in-a-tower quality of her life with him—are the standard stuff of 20-something entanglements. She seems surprised that the early blush of interest has yielded to something so deathly. She feels a sense of alienation, dislocation, and purposelessness. She knows herself to be “great at concealing her true feelings,” so “it was easy for her to get along with him, because she acted like a mood ring.” She doesn’t know who she is or what she wants, et cetera.

  What she most wants is to never use electronics again—they remind her of the web-enabled prison of her marriage. But it’s a paradox of modernity that we can never fully “unplug” from the ways our world has evolved. In attempting to disengage from the clinical Hub she’d called home on the Gogol Industries campus, Hazel finds her father balls deep—literally—in another form of synthetic sentience, another futuristic experiment with the aim of distilling femininity and simplifying love. She thought she was “finished with pretending objects were human,” but it turns out that’s just the way we live now. Byron, reluctant to let her go, maintains a terrifying ambient presence, appearing as a holographic projection, and threatening Hazel with cartoon bad guy lines like, “I did try to warn you, I did, Hazel. You’re leaving me with no choice.” Hazel, rightfully, is afraid for her life.

  Byron is also an unfortunately one-dimensional character, a member of the Soylent set who can often be found “typing on something in his lap that appeared to be a sheet of glass.” He has a telegenic assistant named Fiffany (a detail which offered me no end of delight, a nonsense word I loved to say into the air while reading), who serves Hazel bioengineered kelp and helps her select a wedding dress.

  In proposing the microchip mind-meld (on one knee, in a tux), Byron asks Hazel dramatically, “What is love if not progress?” It’s a ludicrous question—when, except in the coldest assessments of procreation, has romantic love ever been hitched to progress?—but that’s the kind of baddie Byron is. The question is asked so authoritatively, even rhetorically, and in his signature, sinister tone, that all dissent is momentarily vaporized.

  The uncomplicated nature of Byron’s wickedness recalls some of the feminist fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. As critic Laura Miller argued in a 2016 roundup of contemporary novels about unhappy wives, the “mad-housewife or anti-domestic novels of the counterculture era had the benefit of many… mustache-twirling villains—often selfish and domineering husbands, but plenty of other authority figures as well—all of whom insist that the heroine ought to be docile and fulfilled by her pre-assigned role.” Like in those triumphant, early escape-from-domesticity novels, Byron is a straightforward scoundrel, and Hazel’s freedom becomes the unassailable good the reader is cheering for, which can get a bit tiresome.

  It’s true that the reign of the tech bro is most easily—and pleasingly—met with ridicule and caricature. It’s far more challenging to reckon honestly with the boon that is technology, the conveniences it brings, and the ever-unfurling complexities of our dependence upon it. Nutting does do that, but I sometimes wished she had ditched some of the funny clichés to go further.

  Similarly, Hazel’s father’s relationship to an inanimate woman is almost too easy a parable for modern gender inequities and pornified femininity. And there are moments where that plot point feels like simply a gratuitous opportunity for crass humor. I thought of a comment from Lars and the Real Girl, when Lars’s friend says snidely, “I wish my wife couldn’t talk, either,” and wondered when the casual misogyny of husband humor will finally die.

  Alongside the story of Hazel and Byron is another story—that of Jasper, a long-haired lothario and con artist who saves a dolphin one day and becomes an object of national attention. Jasper’s bizarre narrative—which includes a growing sexual attraction to dolphins—startles the reader with its seeming randomness, but it isn’t long before we realize his purpose is to meet Hazel and, perhaps, offer her deliverance. Sure enough, by novel’s end, the two are in a pool, bobbing toward each other helplessly, poised to entwine for a while. Love as a literal drift.

  Made for Love’s overarching message may be that we are not. Made for it, that is. Or at least we’re not great at it. No wonder we’re busy trying to calibrate love and attraction in refrigerated labs and corporate boardrooms. But attempts to relegate human impulses to some eminently manageable virtual domain end up revealing more about humanity than tech. In pursuing the wife who can fuck but can’t speak, or the spotless, neural-networked life à la Gogol Industries (or Google), we merely sublimate, hide, or otherwise try and fail to erase the labor—and the mess—that living requires. In so doing, we make tragically visible just how messy it all really is.

  As Nabokov argued in his exploration of the real Gogol, the absurd is not “something provoking a chuckle or a shrug,” but something more akin to the “pathetic, the human condition.” Nutting’s smart, ribald, and hugely entertaining new novel provokes many chuckles. Occasionally, she reaches higher, and grants the reader flashes of something truly great: a striking view of the pathetic, that Gogolian, absurdist sublime.

  Nina Renata Aron is a writer and editor living in Oakland. Her work has appeared in the New Republic, the Millions, Full Stop, and elsewhere. More from this author →

• Entertainment Weekly
  http://ew.com/books/2017/08/01/made-for-love-alissa-nutting-review/
  Word count: 321

  BOOKS
  Made For Love by Alissa Nutting: EW review

  LEAH GREENBLATT August 01, 2017 AT 02:12 PM EDT
  Made for Love
  TYPEBookGENRENovelPUBLISHEREccoPAGES307PUBLICATION DATE07/04/17AUTHORAlissa Nutting
  WE GAVE IT A
  B+

  Of all the mistakes Hazel has made in her 30ish years on the planet — a woeful hash of snafus, slips, and blunders wrapped up in one unholy burrito of bad judgment — her biggest might have been marrying Byron Gogol. Her second biggest is trying to leave him. A deeply eccentric tech mogul whose ambition and intellect is matched only by his burning need to micromanage everything around him, including his wife, Byron is willing to use all the near-future tools at his disposal to bring her home. And so a dazed, broke, and friendless Hazel finds herself cornered in the only other place she knows: her irascible semi-estranged father’s retirement-community double-wide.

  Made for Love doesn’t so much unfold as spill out, a crackpot piñata of sex dolls, dolphin coitus, and droll postmillennial satire. Nutting’s surreal style is both manic and tender; her characters — the hapless Hazel, her coolly malevolent ex, a leathery, nippleless outlaw named Liver — read like demented refugees from a Kurt Vonnegut novel, dragged into the 21st century and deep-fried in Florida sunshine. But they’re endearingly human too: kooks and misfits who fail at love over and over, and still, against all evidence, try again. B+

  Opening Lines:
  “Hazel’s seventy-six-year-old father had bought a doll. A life-size woman doll. The kind designed to provide a sexual experience that came as close as possible to having sex with a living (or maybe, Hazel thought, a more apt analogy was a very-very-recently deceased) female. Its arrival crate bore an uncanny resemblance to a no-frills pine coffin. It made Hazel recall the passage from Dracula where he ships himself overseas via boat.”

• Pank
  https://pankmagazine.com/2017/09/01/review-made-love-alissa-nutting/
  Word count: 805

  [REVIEW] Made for Love by Alissa Nutting
  POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 1, 2017

  Ecco Books, 2017

  REVIEWED BY MATT E. LEWIS

  —

  Readers familiar with Alissa Nutting know that she is not one to shy away from taboo subjects. Her novel Tampa delves into the mind of sociopathic English teacher Celeste Price, who despite having the “perfect” life, uses her position to prey on young boys. Price is, in Nutting’s own words, a monster – but despite all the contempt we feel for her, the point she ultimately makes is that she is still human, albeit based in a nature we prefer to deny than admit. In her newest novel, Made for Love, we are introduced to many more characters that are just as lacking in empathy as Celeste, but in a different kind of story – a near-future tale of a toxic relationship supported by omnipresent technology, delphinaphilia, and sex dolls, all set in what is ostensibly Florida, despite Florida never actually being named.

  Hazel has just left her husband, technology guru Byron Gogol of Gogol industries, after his creepy embrace of new science has culminated in asking her to merge brains with him. She flees to the one place she hopes she’ll be accepted without judgement, her father’s trailer park, only to interrupt him on his honeymoon with his newest addition to the family – an inanimate sex doll he calls “Diane”. Embarrassed but with nowhere else to go, he allows Hazel to stay with him as she figures things out. Staying with her Dad causes feelings (both new and old) of anxiety to surface, which she attempts to stuff down with large quantities of questionable alcohol and getting to know the strange denizens of her father’s area. As if the process of divorce wasn’t complicated enough, she soon learns that Byron is not ready to let her go yet – and with an armada of smart devices at his disposal, cutting him off may become completely impossible.

  Meanwhile, a man named Jasper is a few towns over celebrating his latest victory: another successful con of a lonely woman for her life savings. Before leaving for a new city to start his process of seduction and ensnarement all over again, he decides to take an indulgent dip into the ocean near his beachside motel. Unfortunately for him, things soon take a dangerous turn when he is attacked by a clearly-aroused dolphin, who bites him on the arm and nearly drowns him. He wrestles both himself and the dolphin back to shore, where a gathering crowd mistakes the event for Jasper rescuing the animal from beaching itself. But rather than accept the praise for the heroic act, he escapes, fearing his conniving past would be brought to light. Soon on the lam from the seekers of the hero and his angry exes, Jasper finds himself grappling with feelings for dolphins that are…complicated, to say the least.

  Made for Love is filled with Nutting’s trademark dark humor and wry critiques of modern life. Hazel is a nuanced and complex character – her decisions are based on a kind of logic which ping-pongs back and forth between extremes. Ironically, she knows herself very well, but like too many of us, has made decisions counter to her wants and needs in the name of false stability. Of course, the extreme stability of a bland tech CEO’s life has her craving the kind of chaos that makes us all human, the messy equalizer that should be embraced in life rather than accepted in death. Jasper, on the other hand, is another study of the shocking lack of empathy that certain people can have for others. But in the process of events, Jasper goes from contemptable to pitiable as his affliction grows and turns him from con-man to a victim of his own emotions. Made for Love is really a book about how are choices shape and define our humanity, how our lives and those around us can be changed through the power of free will. It’s a celebration for the sympathy of self, an occasionally ridiculous and heartfelt study of being okay with who you are in the face of an increasingly technological, bureaucratic, and still just as puritanical, American society. In other words, it’s an island of sanity in a time that seems hell-bent on driving us all to the brink. Wherever you are, take a break, kick up your feet, and let the antics of Nutting’s world keep you away from your phone for a while. It’s her gift to us.

  This entry was posted in BOOK REVIEWS and tagged Alissa Nutting, book reviews, Ecco Books, Made for Love, Matt E. Lewis. Bookmark the permalink.

• New York Daily News
  http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/theater-arts/made-love-review-wildly-funny-tale-technology-love-article-1.3294084
  Word count: 483

  ‘Made for Love’ book review: Wildly funny tale of technology and love

  Tweet

  email
  “Made for Love” is out July 4
  “Made for Love” is out July 4. (ECCO)
  BY ALLISON CHOPIN
  NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
  Saturday, July 1, 2017, 4:18 PM
  TITLE
  MADE FOR LOVE

  AUTHOR:
  Alissa Nutting
  Hazel has just left her husband, Byron Gogol, the CEO of tech giant Gogol Industries, and moved in with her father and his sex doll, Diane, in their trailer in a retirement community.

  After 10 years of constant surveillance of his wife, Byron wants to put a chip in Hazel’s brain so they can “mind-meld.” That’s the last straw for Hazel, but Byron isn’t going to let her go that easily.

  If that sounds like a totally absurd premise, it is, and Alissa Nutting’s “Made for Love” delivers with this wacky, hysterical and crazy-compelling story.

  Virtually every sentence of this book is laugh-out-loud hilarious. Nutting starts with scenarios that are already ridiculous, and she takes them to the extreme, until your sides are splitting and your senses are dazzled. With her wit plus the intrigue of the plot, it really is impossible to put down.

  Teenage social justice gone wrong in ‘No Good Deed’: review
  To let a few lines speak for themselves, here’s how the book opens:

  “Hazel’s seventy-six-year-old father had bought a doll. A life-size woman doll. The kind designed to provide a sexual experience that came as close as possible to having sex with a living (or maybe, Hazel thought, a more apt analogy was a very-very-recently deceased) female.”

  And later:

  “Sure, most people who heard about his plan would want to discuss reasons why he should not attempt to seize a dolphin from corporate ownership and pursue domestic cohabitation with the mammal, but the first guy who discovered fire probably had a lot of naysayers too.”

  ‘Inside V’ review: Hunt for husband in twisted marriage tale
  (Did I mention there’s a character who, after a freak accident, can only fantasize about sex with dolphins? This book is certainly raunchy, but in a way that’s just so impressively absurd.)

  The use of futuristic technology to drive Hazel’s problems is genius and hits scarily close to home. If Gogol’s name sounds like another omnipresent tech company we’re all familiar with, that’s probably not a coincidence.

  And under the layers of brilliant, rollicking prose and the threat of technology consuming our lives, there’s a poignant tale of the nature of love, marriage and family. And a lot of hilarious details on the mechanics of a sex doll.

  “Made for Love” is out July 4 from Ecco.

• BookPage
  https://bookpage.com/reviews/21516-alissa-nutting-made-love#.WjiEsN-nEdU
  Word count: 538

  MADE FOR LOVE
  By Alissa Nutting

  Ecco
  $25.99
  ISBN 9780062280558
  Published 07/04/2017

  Fiction / Comic Fiction

  Buy the book

  Bammlogo Amazonlogo Bnlogo Indiebound
  TRENDING BOOK REVIEWS
  Small
  THE TRUTH BENEATH THE LIES
  By Amanda Searcy

  With chapters that alternate between two troubled, seemingly unconnected girls, Amanda Searcy’s debut novel...

  Small
  THE ICE HOUSE
  By Laura Lee Smith

  The Scots didn’t invent stubbornness, but they perfected it, raised it to a high art where irresistible force...

  Small
  AN UNCOMMON READER
  By Helen Smith

  Edward Garnett, a reader with exquisite taste, a perceptive critic and a writer, played a crucial role in the...

  Small
  THE ONLY GIRL IN THE WORLD
  By Maude Julien and Adriana Hunter

  As a connoisseur of memoir, I thought I had read it all: stunningly dysfunctional families, toxic relationships,...

  MORE BOOK REVIEWS >
  HOME > BOOK REVIEWS > ARTICLE

  Search Articles...

  Web Exclusive – July 04, 2017

  MADE FOR LOVE
  Looking for love in all the wrong places
  BookPage review by Thane Tierney

  There’s a joke that pretty much encapsulates the central Weltanschauung (outlook) of Alissa Nutting’s latest novel, Made for Love: “Tell someone you love them today, because life is short. But shout it at them in German, because life is also terrifying and confusing.”

  Nutting, the award-winning author of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, drops us in the middle of a mildly dystopian near-future (2019), in which her ensemble cast resembles a box of emotionally damaged (and delightfully neurotic) misfit toys. Hazel Green is trying to escape a loveless marriage to high-tech magnate Byron Gogol, whose character combines elements of Steve Jobs, Svengali and Humbert Humbert. In order to put some distance between herself and her cyber-stalking soon-to-be-ex, she unexpectedly moves into her widower father’s double-wide, where he is residing with Diane, a disturbingly lifelike sex doll. Meanwhile, Jasper Kesper’s accidental amorous encounter with a dolphin has turned him from a con artist and gigolo into an unwitting cetophile.

  What could possibly go wrong?

  Turns out that William Congreve got it wrong when he opined back in 1697 that “Heaven has no rage, like love to hatred turned / Nor hell a fury, like a woman scorned.” All Hazel wants is to get away from a seemingly omnipotent husband who has planted a chip in her head (so as to effect a digital mind meld). It’s Byron who is filled with a sort of low-affect fury, because Hazel’s defiance represents a personal and professional setback, both of which he finds unacceptable.

  All these madcap threads weave into a tapestry worthy of such surreal comic authors as Christopher Moore or Dave Barry, but the novel is underpinned by a profound meditation on the nature of love, and how it not only comes in a variety of shapes and sizes, but also materials and species.

  Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, California, and likes dolphins, but draws the line there.

• Slate
  http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2017/07/10/alissa_nutting_s_novel_made_for_love_invites_us_to_rethink_the_iphone.html
  Word count: 1032

  Is Our Relationship With the iPhone Just Another Loveless Marriage?
  By Jacob Brogan
  637816964
  Better than a cracked screen?
  Photo illustration by Jacob Brogan. Photos by aleepiskin/Thinkstock and Elvinagraph/Thinkstock.

  I never expected to fall in love with the iPhone. Just over a decade ago, I watched the original launch video at my father’s behest while visiting him in his cluttered grade school classroom. I found it hard to understand the fuss. Both Steve Jobs’ exaggerated gravitas and my father’s child-like enthusiasm struck me as faintly ridiculous. At best, I thought, it might be a useful gadget. At worst? An expensive toy no more compelling than the drawers of paint and sheaves of paper piled around me.

  I never did fall in love with the iPhone, but I’ve apologized to my father more than once for my initial skepticism. He was right—much as Jobs was right—that it would change the way we live and work. For almost 10 years, I’ve been shackled to a series of phones I didn’t think I wanted—a loveless marriage, maybe, but a marriage all the same.

  I found myself thinking back on that bond while reading Alissa Nutting’s new novel, Made for Love. As Nutting’s story opens, a woman named Hazel descends on her widower father’s retirement community, seeking refuge from her failed marriage to tech billionaire Byron Gogol. Theirs was never a romantic story: Like Jobs introducing the iPhone, Byron’s proposal had been severe, almost robotic, and she accepted it more out of a desire to be free from “life’s material consequences” than an interest in the man himself. She spent, we learn, the next 10 years cloistered in his fortress-like home while he worked, surrounded by high-tech devices of his own design.

  The length of their marriage—those 10 years a neat parallel to our own decade with the iPhone—is surely no accident. Made for Love is nothing if not an allegory about the way we slipped and fell into a relationship with technology, increasingly bound to devices that sometimes seem to limit us, even as they furnish once unimaginable luxuries. Hazel has reason to hate Byron—just as we sometimes loathe our phones—but when she abandons him, it’s partly because she knows she’s been missing out on feellings she can’t quite name. She longs for something Byron’s wealth and technology could never offer, the opportunity to lose herself in the world again. “Hazel wanted to begin forming her own mental maps, fallible and distractible as they might be—her very own lay of the land,” Nutting writes.

  That desire doesn’t come without danger: Hazel is convinced that Byron will have her killed. In what may be this novel’s most troubling feature, the threat of spousal violence is sometimes played for laughs. In any case, the possibility is more resonant in the abstract, offering a reminder that it’s increasingly difficult to imagine surviving in our world without the technological signposts that lead us through it. For Hazel, it’s worth the risk, as she rids herself of the phone that links her to Byron: “[T]here was a tiny bit of control and comfort in the fact that while he could kill her tomorrow, maybe he couldn’t make her use a cell phone before he did it.” Spurning her husband’s technology may be the only way to reclaim her power.

  It’s only when Made for Love heads into more definitively science fictional territory that Byron’s true menace manifests. He wants, we learn, to put a chip in Hazel’s head that would allow their brains to communicate with each other. His obsession is disquieting because he doesn’t seem to care what she thinks or feels; he simply wants to know. It’s here that he seems most monstrously robotic, a living manifestation of our digital condition: Like Byron, our devices don’t aim to know us so much as they make us over, transforming us into something knowable by reshaping our lives around their conveniences. In his own way, Byron can already read her mind, thanks to the way his devices limit the contours of her experience.

  y450-293
  Against the emerging horror of neurotechnology—and the workaday drudgery of the devices we already own—the book manifests a longing for the substantial physicality of earlier, more analogue forms of life: Hazel fondly remembers “her father’s roundhouse fights with their old TV,” the way he would whack the set when it went haywire. There was something reciprocal in the act, Nutting suggests: If hitting a machine brings the picture back into focus, there’s still something like a give-and-take in your relationship with it. Those struggles may have been maddening, but at least you could push back when things went wrong. Our phones, by contrast, are like “porcelain eggs holding the fetus of baby Jesus”—so fragile that we’ve unconsciously learned to bend our habits to better care for them.

  It there’s a thesis here—and it might be asking too much of the book to impose one—it might be that there’s value in celebrating our corporeal peculiarities, and the strange twists and turns of embodied experience that get us there. We can’t force ourselves to love our phones any more than our phones can force us to love them. And yet we’ve ended up living with them anyway, much as some of us end up in loveless relationships just because the wrong person happened to be in the room at the right time. In both cases, there’s a nebulous comfort to remembering that desire directs us along byways Google Maps could never find. Following those paths might not set us free, but at least it promises something like release.

  Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University.

  Jacob Brogan writes for Slate about technology and culture. Follow him on Twitter.

• Book Forum
  http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/024_02/17951
  Word count: 327

  JUNE/JULY/AUG 2017
  Secondhand Emotion
  The erotic highs and lows of living dolls, dolphins, and devices
  SARAH NICOLE PRICKETT

  TINA TURNER PUT OUT her most popular song, “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” a year before I was a fetus, but on nice days when I was a child it played so often on the boom box in the neighbor’s backyard that I thought it was new. I was already going to be a critic: I thrilled to her spinto mezzo-soprano, memorized her words so I could sing along, and then the second the song ended, for about the thirtieth time, rolled my eyes and said to my brother, “This is so stupid. ‘Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?’ Then who needs an arm when an arm can be broken?!” A few months later, I saw a three-limbed man at my great-grandmother’s retirement home and learned that you can live without one arm, or even without two. Somehow this did not prepare me for the eventual discovery that some people live without hearts.

  Technically, those who live in Alissa Nutting’s oeuvre, which so far comprises a debut collection of short stories, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls (2011); a perfect cause célèbre of a first novel, Tampa (2013); and now a second novel, Made for Love, are what is called loveless. Love for others and themselves is what they lack. But because there is no more metonymic part of the body, save maybe the hand (“let lips do as hands do”), it’s no stretch to see them as having some undefined muscle where the heart should be. Celeste, the hot teacher in Tampa who sleeps with her eighth-grade male students and is deemed, when caught, to be “too pretty for prison,” has something worse. “People are often startled by my handwriting; because I’m pretty, they assume everything …

• SF Gate
  http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Made-for-Love-by-Alissa-Nutting-11748846.php
  Word count: 261

  ‘Made for Love,’ by Alissa Nutting
  By Alexis Burling Published 1:46 pm, Thursday, August 10, 2017

  "Made for Love" Photo: Ecco
  Photo: Ecco
  IMAGE 1 OF 2 "Made for Love"
  Signup Morning Report
  MORNING REPORTDAILY NEWSLETTEREverything you need to know to start your day
  You agree to our Terms of Use. Your information will be used as described in our Privacy Policy.

  Enter your email address
  SIGN UP
  If your literary tastes lean toward the realistic — family dramas, torrid romances, anything with an emotional journey — Alissa Nutting’s second novel, “Made for Love,” won’t be for you. But if wackadoo narratives with hints of adventure and characters with bizarre personality quirks are more your speed, this weird and meandering puzzle of a book might be just the ticket.

  Maybe.

  The story has all the elements of absurdist fiction, some of which become immediately apparent as the book’s opening scene unfolds. It’s August 2019, and 32-year-old Hazel has just shown up at her 76-year-old father’s trailer in Shady Acres, a retirement community for adults over 55. He moved there after Hazel’s mother passed away from cancer.

  But Dear Old Dad isn’t just wheeling around on his Rascal mobility scooter, chatting with the other white hairs when Hazel rolls up unannounced with a suitcase. Instead, he’s making himself quite comfortable with his new life-size doll ... er ... “companion” he calls Diane (who is quite voluptuous and anatomically correct, if you know what I mean).

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/02/tampa-alissa-nutting-review
  Word count: 789

  Tampa by Alissa Nutting – review
  Sarah Churchwell on a controversial debut about a female paedophile
  'Too pretty for prison' … US sex offender Debra Lafave, who in 2006 escaped a prison sentence for sl
  'Too pretty for prison' … US sex offender Debra Lafave, who in 2006 escaped a prison sentence for sleeping with her 14-year-old student. Photograph: Melissa Lyttle/AP
  Sarah Churchwell

  Friday 2 August 2013 05.00 EDT First published on Friday 2 August 2013 05.00 EDT
  View more sharing options
  Shares
  131
  Comments
  9
  The plot of Tampa, a debut novel by Alissa Nutting, is simple: Celeste Price – 26 years old, married, affluent, gorgeous – has just been hired as a schoolteacher in suburban Tampa, Florida. She has chosen to devote her life to the education of 14-year-old boys, ostensibly teaching English. In reality, however, the only education Celeste cares about is carnal. She is driven by a sexual obsession so all-consuming that it determines her every thought and action: all she wants is sex with pubescent boys, all the time.Because she is beautiful and not unintelligent, selecting her prey with care (requirements include disengaged parents and an unwillingness to boast), she easily seduces a boy named Jack. They proceed to have sex constantly – in the classroom, his house, her car. Eventually the secret comes out, and predictable consequences ensue. What comes in between is sex, lots of it, explicit and raw, a pornographic parody of the teacher in loco parentis ("I rinsed and patted him dry before I started giving him his very first rim job"). When Celeste isn't having spectacular sex with boys, she is masturbating or submitting to sex she finds nauseating with her husband or other adult men. She is insatiable and indefatigable. The reader may not be so lucky.

  Sign up for the Bookmarks email
  Read more
  Tampa arrives flanked by quotations that liken it to Lolita, an inevitable comparison that doesn't do it any favours. Tampa resembles Lolita superficially at best: both are about compulsive paedophiles, but the similarity ends there. Humbert Humbert famously declares as Nabokov's novel opens: "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns … O, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!" In the opening pages of Tampa, Celeste fantasises about whispering to a boy at a school dance: "I want to smell you come in your pants." So much for playing with words.

  The novel was inspired by the case of Debra Lafave, a 24-year-old American teacher who was arrested for an affair with her 14-year-old student, but escaped a custodial sentence when her defence attorney successfully argued that she was "too pretty for prison" – an argument that is certainly ripe for satire. Nutting's writing is clean and controlled, its banality surely deliberate – an echo of the psychopath's lack of affect that Bret Easton Ellis used so cleverly in American Psycho. But Nutting offers nothing to supplement the arid vacuum of obsessive lust in which Celeste is trapped. Nutting is obviously not endorsing Celeste's behaviour, but while disapprobation is a necessary condition for satire, it is not a sufficient one. In order to achieve satire, a writer must also be funny. Lolita and American Psycho target not only the central characters, but the societies whose empty, toxic desires they exemplify. The comedy of American Psycho is also predicated, for example, on an implicit running gag about what it means to "make a killing" on Wall Street, so that the banality of evil comes to satirical life before us. Celeste's infinite superficiality and terror of ageing certainly embody some key anxieties of millennial America, but the parallels stop there, and the reader is left entrapped in this barren psychic landscape, with little to watch but a teacher who masturbates on her classroom desk.

  We do not have to fall into inane debates about whether Celeste is likable in order to require some kind of compensatory pleasure that enables us to like the novel. And making Celeste a serial sexual predator, relentlessly stalking 14-year-olds, actually evades the moral questions instead of confronting them. Lacking any other saving stylistic or satirical grace, the novel ends up as fixated on sex with children as its protagonist. In the end, I don't want to be inside the mind of a sociopath; it proves the most unedifying place imaginable. If only you could always count on a paedophile for a fancy prose style, too.

  • Sarah Churchwell's book Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby is out now.

• Washington Post
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/book-world-tampa-fumbles-with-a-taboo/2013/07/01/56efbd9e-dab7-11e2-a9f2-42ee3912ae0e_story.html?utm_term=.e76fc11be14a
  Word count: 854

  Books
  Book World: ‘Tampa’ fumbles with a taboo
  By Lisa Zeidner July 1, 2013
  Twenty-one years ago, when Nicholson Baker published his phone-sex novel, “Vox,” the advance-reader copies were wrapped in plain brown paper, marked with a big X on the front to warn about the smutty content. Alissa Nutting’s publisher has borrowed from the same playbook to promote her first novel, “Tampa”: a black cover with bold red letters announcing, “Caution: Explicit Content.”

  How readers respond to this novel will largely depend on how they feel about reading blow-by-blows about sex between a 26-year-old middle-school teacher and the 14-year-old boys she craves. Some readers will praise the story as an uncompromising look at a remorseless sexual deviant. Others will dismiss it as a distasteful act of provocateurship. Either way, the controversy will presumably move some copies.

  The other warning readers should have is that, by the author’s own admission, “Tampa” baldly borrows from “Lolita,” with a female instead of male predator. In fact, this novel is basically a cover of Vladimir Nabokov’s classic — like a local wedding band doing a Beatles tune.

  Nutting’s narrator, Celeste Price, may be a sociopath, but she’s an undeniably pretty, buxom blonde. The wife of a good-natured but doltish cop who comes from enough family money to keep her in a red Corvette and an expensive skin-care regimen, Celeste has taken a job as an eighth-grade English teacher at Jefferson Junior High to get closer to boys “at the very last link of androgyny that puberty would permit.” Like Humbert Humbert in “Lolita,” she must choose her victim carefully: He has to be just a little shy, unlikely to brag about coupling with the hot teacher, and not too zealously supervised at home. Like Humbert, she eventually has to submit to sex with the repulsive parent of the object of her affection in order to ensure continued access. Like Humbert, she’s eventually free of that pesky parent without having to resort to a weapon herself.

  The boy she falls for is Jack Patrick, a perfectly mediocre young man with the requisite innocence. Once she ensnares him, they go at it in a variety of venues, including her Corvette. “Sex struck me as a seafood with the shortest imaginable shelf life,” Celeste confides, “needing to be peeled and eaten the moment the urge ripened.” Jack is madly in love; Celeste, ever the realist, considerably less so, since she “couldn’t imagine remaining attracted to him beyond fifteen at the latest.”

  Book Club newsletter

  Monthly book reviews and recommendations.

  Sign up
  “Tampa” by Alissa Nutting. (Ecco)
  That’s where Nutting diverges most from the Lolita script, since Humbert is, indeed, seriously infatuated with the object of his affections; his feelings about Lolita are complex, so his tenderness and longing complicate our view of his calculating sociopathy. Celeste remains mostly a “soulless pervert” whom we listen to “with a curious revulsion, the same way one might watch a cow give birth.” She remains largely unreflective about the roots of her fixation on boys. Jack isn’t a particularly well-delineated or interesting character, and the setting, despite presumably being Tampa, is so generic that the novel might as well be called “Akron.”

  No one will be terribly surprised to hear that Celeste eventually gets caught. Here’s where Nutting could really update the Lolita story to examine gender bias in our reaction to statutory rape charges and how such cases play out in the public sphere, especially after Jerry Sandusky and other recent high-profile sexual abuse cases. But the novel’s coda is rushed, and unlike, say, Russell Banks in his eerie, uncompromising “The Lost Memory of Skin,” which also looks at sex involving minors, Nutting plays the consequences mostly for laughs. In prison, one of Celeste’s big worries is the lack of her “high-end facial-contouring creams.”

  Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with laughing about taboo subjects. In fact, the effort is to be applauded. It’s just difficult to get the tone right. For the most part, Nutting doesn’t. That’s a shame, because she’s capable of knockout writing. A middle-aged jogger has a “caffeinated ponytail, which was perched in the top center of her skull like a plume on the hat of a Napoleonic infantryman.” A student’s nervous mother has an expression “of squeezed panic, like a ferret dressed up in a miniature corset.” Such frissons of pleasure are studded throughout “Tampa” like cloves on a ham. Nutting is particularly piquant about the Ferris Bueller travails of public school. Most of the ample sex scenes, however, are not funny, titillating or particularly revealing. They provoke a reaction best captured by a word that the novel’s eighth graders often mouth: Eeewww.

  Zeidner’s fifth novel, “Love Bomb,” was recently published. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University in Camden, N.J.

  Tampa

  By Alissa Nutting

  Ecco. 266 pp. $25.99

• New York Times
  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/books/alissa-nuttings-tampa-and-more.html
  Word count: 243

  Newly Released Books
  Alissa Nutting’s ‘Tampa,’ and More
  By SUSANNAH MEADOWSJULY 24, 2013

  Continue reading the main storyShare This Page
  Share
  Tweet
  Pin
  Email
  More
  Save
  This month, six female authors take a dark view of things. In three story collections and three debut novels, they write about exploitation, sadness and murder. Luckily, love makes the occasional cameo.

  Photo

  TAMPA
  By Alissa Nutting
  266 pages. Ecco. $25.99.

  Brave is the author who invites comparison with Nabokov. And here it is: Ms. Nutting’s run at a gender-swapped “Lolita” doesn’t come close to the original — how could it? Which is not to say her rather raunchy debut novel isn’t a highly diverting read. But trying to make her predator, 26-year-old Celeste, as funny as Humbert Humbert is a losing game. Ms. Nutting is more successful when she’s exploring what’s hers alone — the difference gender makes. The seduction of a 14-year-old male student by his hot middle school teacher is culturally less pervy than Nabokov’s plot; when they have sex in the back of her Corvette, it’s hard not to be a little happy for the guy. So it’s a much bigger leap to show that this relationship between unequals is every bit as destructive as a man and a girl’s, and Ms. Nutting lands it.

  Photo

• New Republic
  https://newrepublic.com/article/113729/alissa-nutting-tampa-reviewed-maggie-shipstead
  Word count: 1564

  The Phony Transgressiveness of 'Tampa'
  This summer's big, erotic novel is like 'Lolita' without the charm
  BY MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD
  July 2, 2013
  What makes a piece of fiction erotica? I’d say that erotic fiction is defined by explicit sexual content included for its own sake (not necessarily in service of a story) and an intent to arouse. Since as far back as John Cleland’s Fanny Hill: Or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (published in England in 1748), erotic fiction has tended to have a cyclical, masturbation-friendly structure. Flimsy, ostensibly plot-advancing sequences segue into sexual encounters much in the way pizza deliveries and doctor appointments perfunctorily frame pornographic movies, providing a bit of context and loosely situating the observed participants.

  MOST POPULAR
  The EPA Is Using Taxpayer Dollars to Track the Press
  Backlash
  The Republican Tax Bill Is a Gift to the Washington “Blob”
  Trump Is Sabotaging the Russia Investigation—With Fox News’ Help
  The End of Economic Nationalism
  Then there are difficult-to-classify books like Phillip Roth’s 1995 National Book Award winning Sabbath’s Theater, which contains some of the most stunningly dirty writing I’ve ever encountered and certainly aims to arouse but, because of the relentless and disturbing connections Roth draws between sex and death, and his complicated, elevated prose, the book would be out of place on a shelf next to the more mom-friendly, BDSM-lite Fifty Shades of Grey.

  Tampa, Alissa Nutting’s first novel, is difficult to label but for different reasons. The book has garnered attention in advance of its release as something of a gender-inverted Lolita spiced up with a dash of American Psycho’s nihilism: It features a female, 26-year-old narrator who has an all-consuming sexual fetish for 14-year-old boys and becomes an eighth-grade English teacher to satisfy her urges.1 In part, Tampa seems to belong to the literary-fiction-infused-with-sex, Rothian genre—a novel with titillating interludes but also a core idea: how much less disturbing we find relationships between grown women and young boys than those between men and underage girls. (“Are the boys really victims, or just lucky?”—the jokes go when stories of this ilk arise in the national media.) But Tampa’s challenge to that the double standard is not especially potent. Because its sexual content is both highly graphic and purposefully off-putting, it occupies uneasy, unresolved territory between erotica and satire.

  A gender-inverted Lolita spiced up with a dash of American Psycho’s nihilism.
  The plot revolves around a student named Jack Patrick, whose “lanky-limbed smoothness” thrills the narrator, Celeste, to the point of derangement and whose lack of parental supervision provides opportunities for conquest. Celeste, who rigorously maintains her “perfectly taut,” blond, berry-smelling person in strict alignment with teen fantasy, seduces him without trouble. After weeks of reconnaissance that mostly involves masturbating in her car outside Jack’s house, she keeps him after class and offers him her body, which he seizes enthusiastically, if with disbelieving befuddlement. So begins an affair that is energetically conducted in her car and Jack’s house until Jack’s paunchy, lecherous jackass of a father becomes a problematic interloper and things begin to unravel.

  Celeste’s desire for a specific sort of boy—“at the very last link of androgyny that puberty would permit him: undeniably male but not man”—is cast as an innate, insatiable perversion rooted in a fear of death. For Celeste, sex is a Rothian engine pistoning away in a doomed race against the tide of mortality. She is plagued by an awareness “that my time with Jack, that our bodies and everything we’d each ever known, would all inevitably decay and fall apart.” The sight of her 31-year-old husband, a cop with family money, smoking a cigar makes him “seem even more ancient, as though he was smoking his very own future cremains.” She knows, even if Jack does not, that she will lose interest in him within a year or two. When she gets old enough to have more difficultly finding willing partners, she plans to pay runaways for sex.

  Tampa’s investigation of the double standard it invokes lacks emotional force, however, because the nuances of the boys’ experiences are obscured by their physical eagerness and by Celeste’s soulless narration. Jack, being a smitten and dazzled teenager, believes he and Celeste will be together forever, but we only see his distress through her brusque annoyance at his devotion. When he asks her to tell him she loves him, she gives in: “it would be more than slightly hypocritical for me to belabor the conversation further by taking some odd stance on an insistence of honesty.” An interesting moment is lost in stilted language.

  While the more complex emotions at play in Tampa are sometimes given short shrift, Celeste’s fantasies and encounters are explicitly and relentlessly rendered. But Tampa does not quite descend to the level of pure porn; its flights of fancy often sail into the stylized realm of the ridiculous:

  I imagined Jack’s body made gigantic standing before me … if his horizon-colored pants began to bunch and fall and his teenage sex of skyscraper proportions was freed, I would drive my car into his toe so he would kneel down to investigate and accidentally kill me when the sequoia-sized head of his penis came crashing through my windshield.

  Well, that’s one way to go. She spends so much time masturbating that I eventually wondered why there weren’t more scenes where she does laundry. Bowling with her husband, she imagines “a pantless Jack standing spread-eagle atop the lane’s gleaming wooden floors, repeatedly bending over and swinging the bowling ball between his knees, his testicles coming alive with motion.” Late in the novel, cut off from Boyd, the kid who succeeds Jack, Celeste says she’d give anything “for just an eyedropper of [his] semen to play with.” Maybe I’m unadventurous, but I would describe these longings not as erotic but as silly or, in the case of the last, gross. The wild explicitness, too, demonstrates how Tampa is a product of the double standard it criticizes: with the genders reversed but the raunchy content preserved, Tampa would never have been published—at least not by HarperCollins.

  With the genders reversed but the raunchy content preserved, Tampa would never have been published.
  Despite its surreal moments, Tampa doesn’t quite transcend erotica because if you excised all the descriptions of genitals and bodily secretions, there wouldn’t be much left. Lolita this is not. Humbert Humbert seduced the reader with elegance of thought, shifting admissions of guilt, and gorgeous verbal trickery. Celeste’s description of her own sociopathic blankness and single-minded sexual predation is straightforward, unrepentant, and betrays little desire to win over the reader. The relentlessly graphic language surrounding transgressive desire is intended to shock, but is it intended to arouse? I think so, even if Celeste’s sexual quest is unsympathetic and the idea of sex with a middle schooler repellent. Bombard readers with enough sex talk, though, and probably something in there will hit the mark, however imperfectly. Maybe the intention in provoking arousal is to engender another layer of shock, to force readers to reconsider their own depraved depths. But that seems more like a form of entrapment more than a catalyst for revelation.

  I’ll also admit to some difficulty fully believing in a woman with Celeste’s particular voraciousness, which perhaps is part of the point of the book. Nutting seems interested in provoking skepticism as a way of drawing attention to the prejudices that underlie it. We don’t expect women to be pedophilic nymphomaniacs, and yet Celeste’s entire psyche is occupied by sex; she spends every hour of every day either actively pursuing it, perfecting her body as a lure, or, in her down time, masturbating to such stimuli as boy band videos. Maybe my imagination is at fault here—certainly human desire exists in almost infinite variety, and certainly women can be monstrous. Celeste comes across as an unrepentant sociopath, both in terms of her sexual exploitativeness and her total lack of compassion. Confronted with a corpse whose death she is arguably responsible for, her response is to poke at its cheeks with a “manicured toe” and feel for a pulse with her foot. Elsewhere she remarks that she does not want a son because “at a certain age it would be impossible to ignore him.”

  Unmitigated monstrosity is not the most incisive means of approaching the subject of female pedophilia. By making Celeste essentially inhuman, a satirical cartoon of a predator, Nutting avoids the tangled issues of power that lie beneath cultural norms for gender and sex. If Celeste were complicated beyond her fixation, the novel would be more erotic, more transgressive, and sharper in its commentary.

  A sampling of the heralding the novel has received: Amazon picked it as a best book of the month; Cosmopolitan called it “the summer's baddest, buzziest novel.” It’s also been put in the same category as last-summer’s blockbuster, Gone Girl.

  Maggie Shipstead is the author of Seating Arrangements and Astonish Me.
  @maggieshipstead

• The Independent
  http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/book-review-tampa-by-alissa-nutting-8783711.html
  Word count: 570

  CultureBooksReviews
  Book review: Tampa, By Alissa Nutting
  A paedophile tells all – we learn nothing

  Robert Epstein Saturday 24 August 2013 20:47 BST0 comments

  0

  Click to follow
  The Independent Culture
  With Operation Yewtree rewriting our memories of 1970s Saturday-evening entertainment, it’s been hard to open a newspaper recently without being assaulted by a barrage of paedophilia. Yet little, if any, has related to a female adult protagonist, which is what makes Tampa an intriguing prospect.

  Alissa Nutting’s debut was inspired by the case of her former high-school peer, Debra Lafave. A Florida teacher, Lafave pleaded guilty in 2005 to a case of lewd or lascivious battery, after having sex with one of her 14-year-old students. Yet she didn’t go to prison because, her lawyer argued, she was too attractive, and to put her away would be, “like putting a piece of raw meat in with the lions”.

  Celeste Price, Nutting’s anti-hero, is betting on the same argument to keep her out of jail. Only, she doesn’t expect ever to be apprehended, because she is cunning in her choice of lover: she goes for quiet boys, those who would be too afraid to say anything to their parents and who lack friends to show off to.

  New Rule Leaves Washington Drivers Fuming
  Insider Daily Insurance Quotes
  Top 11 Things All Psoriatic Arthritis Patients Should Do
  HealthCentral.com
  Finding Poetry Among the Vines and Wines of Lodi, CA
  Visit Lodi
  by Taboola Sponsored Links
  In an interview three years after her sentencing, Lafave attributed her behaviour to a bipolar disorder. Such disorders are known to relate to irrational mood swings, to hypersexuality and low impulse control – yet beyond a primitive acknowledgement of such psychoses in Celeste, Nutting fails to proffer a deeper examination of her character’s driving forces.

  Instead, she focuses on satirising a society that prefers to look away, rather than accept that a beautiful woman could hide the darkness of a self-confessed “soulless pervert”. Which is fine as far as it goes – but that’s not terribly far.

  In pre-publicity, Nutting made it clear that she wished to provide a contemporary Lolita, but rather than the poetry that makes Humbert Humbert so appallingly appealing, Celeste Price is merely vulgar: when not actively engaging in sex acts with her underage victims – which she often is, in great detail – she is masturbating while dreaming of them or having sex with appropriate adults in order to cover up her indiscretions. Such is her lack of emotional cognisance, she might as well be a robot switched to “rabbit” setting.

  The banality of Celeste’s language is surely intended to reflect her sociopathy, but it starts to pall as we wait – and wait – for a broader moral point to be made. When it does arrive, it is too late and far too limited in scope to make the mass of explicit, brazen horror that precedes it worth trawling through.

  It is a shame, given the currency of the subject matter, but while Tampa aims to be disquietingly controversial; in the end, it is just disappointingly crude. As empty as its protagonist, the novel is stuck in her superficial worldview and lacks the gravitas or literary panache to pull us out of it.

• New York Journal of Books
  https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/tampa
  Word count: 619

  Tampa
  Image of Tampa: A Novel
  Author(s):
  Alissa Nutting
  Release Date:
  May 27, 2013
  Publisher/Imprint:
  Ecco
  Pages:
  256
  Buy on Amazon

  Reviewed by:
  Michael Adelberg
  “Professor Nutting veers into difficult territory and unearths virgin soil.”

  After 500 years, there aren’t that many new ideas left for novels—but Alissa Nutting may have just found one.

  Her new novel, Tampa, is written from the viewpoint of a female sexual predator. Her narrator, Celeste Price, is a middle school teacher who has seduced two of her students, and contributed to the death of the father of one of these boys. Tampa is Price’s cold confession.

  While some readers will consider the very premise of Tampa a disturbing non-starter, others will find it bold and interesting. We do not increase our understanding of deviants and by ignoring their existence or by dismissing them on simplistic terms.

  Professor Nutting’s narrative is smart and biting. Her narrator is a fount of wisecracks, i.e., an older man is described as “libido kryptonite.” While a book like Tampa could never be termed a comedy, it is stocked with funny one-liners. And the not-too-serious narration makes it much easier for the reader to push through the unsettling content.

  Celeste Price is deployed to lampoon a number of American institutions and personal quirks. These include mediocre teachers, middle aged men who objectify women, “pear shaped” stay-at-home moms, and cultureless middle class Florida in general.

  Tampa is a coarse book. Several scenes are sexually explicit. Dr. Nutting pulls no punches when describing masturbation, sex with minors, and a variety of kinky, quasi-masochistic acts. The narrator’s relentless cynicism and condescension toward her husband (a decent but simple man) is equally coarse, but in a very different way.

  Professor Nutting has done her homework on sexual predators. Studies reveal that these people are frequently selfish and calculating. They have been characterized as “amoral” rather than “immoral”—indifferent to the lives they scar. This amorality is cited as a reason that recidivism is so high among sexual predators.

  Celeste Price fits this bill.

  If Tampa has a flaw, it lies with Professor’s Nutting somewhat unidimensional treatment of Celeste. We learn that she is attractive, vain, and obsessed with boys. That’s about it. It is odd that Professor Nutting does so little with Celeste’s past or even her present.

  For instance: Does Celeste like animals, international cuisine, art, or sports? Celeste is an English teacher, but we never learn what she likes to read or where she stands on the reforms rocking her profession. Is there anything to Celeste besides her vanity and insatiable appetite for premature males? Professor Nutting misses an opportunity to make Celeste Price a complex person.

  There is a short list of satisfying books written in the voice of a villain: John Hawkes’s Travesty (homicidal driver kills his daughter and himself), Peter Carey’s The True History of Kelly Gang (fictionalized memoir of Australia’s notorious 19th Century bandit), Mahi Binebine’s Horses of God (boy from the Moroccan slums explains his path to Islamist suicide bomber) and some others. Nonetheless, Professor’s Nutting’s decision to give voice to the sexual predator living in our midst ups the ante on this literary fiction subgenre.

  Tampa won’t be for everyone. But it is a smart and realistic book on an important subject. In a densely populated fiction landscape filled with cliché, Professor Nutting veers into difficult territory and unearths virgin soil.

• BookPage
  https://bookpage.com/reviews/15310-alissa-nutting-tampa#.WjiFO9-nEdU
  Word count: 377

  July 2013

  TAMPA
  Into the mind of a predator
  BookPage review by Harvery Freedenberg

  Readers who insist that characters must be “likable” for them to enjoy a story had best steer clear of Alissa Nutting’s debut novel, Tampa, a black comedy whose protagonist’s soul is as dark as a thunderstorm at midnight. But for those of a more adventuresome literary bent who are looking for a frank—and often, frankly funny—glimpse into the troubled mind of a female sexual predator, this swiftly paced novel will generate as many intriguing questions about contemporary sexual mores as it does laughs.

  Inspired by the true story of Debra Lafave, a Tampa middle-school teacher charged in 2004 with “lewd and lascivious battery” for engaging in sex with a student, the novel is narrated by her fictional doppelgänger, Celeste Price, a 26-year-old teacher who’s entered the profession solely to gain access to sexual prey. She soon fixes on Jack Patrick, a 14-year-old student in her English class, where most of the tutelage involves works of literature with strong sexual themes. It doesn’t take long for them to begin a lust-fueled affair, one that unsurprisingly provokes strong emotions in Jack, while allowing Celeste to sate an appetite for sex that’s like “seafood with the shortest imaginable half-life, needing to be peeled and eaten the moment the urge ripened.”

  Take note: Nutting’s descriptions of Celeste’s frequent sexual encounters with her adolescent lover are graphic, even shocking. Equally disturbing is the darkness at the core of Celeste’s being, a depravity that allows her to watch impassively as a character dies of a heart attack or coolly assess how she’ll bring her affair with Jack to what she knows from the beginning will be its inevitable end.

  Nutting has taken a considerable risk in tackling such a transgressive subject at a point in her career when she’s being discovered by most readers for the first time. But a novel can’t succeed based only on a bold premise. It’s a tribute to Nutting’s considerable talent that she adds style and wit to make this a convincing, if deeply troubling, story.

• Bookslut
  http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2013_06_020167.php
  Word count: 1045

  JUNE 2013
  JOSH ZAJDMAN
  FICTION
  TAMPA BY ALISSA NUTTING

  In her debut novel Tampa, Alissa Nutting has done readers a great service by introducing them to Celeste Price. Well, perhaps a caveat is necessary. Certain types of readers (the discerning, the broad, those looking for a novel thrill) will benefit from meeting Celeste. She is a character so brilliantly rendered and lacking any semblance of remorse, humanity, selflessness, or any of the qualities that make for a sympathetic character. Yet it's the absence of these that make her such a compelling one. Furthermore, it's a testament to Nutting's deft skill that Celeste ends up being one of the most interesting people to walk across pages in recent memory, never deviating into arch or even lurid characterization. For a novel centered on transgression, deviance, and sex, that's a feat. This outlying merit applies to the novel itself. This isn't some Lifetime movie, pumped up with dirty bits or salty language. Instead, Tampa is a densely packed literary landmine, just begging to be stepped on. Nutting has undertaken the uglier facets of human behavior in an attempt to force readers to look at themselves, and realize just how simple we really are. Our motivations may be complex, but, at the end of the day, it's a matter of release. Celeste's, first, and last, really.

  When introduced, Celeste has "spent the night before [her] first day of teaching in an excited loop of hushed masturbation." Next to her, asleep lies her husband, Ford. Together, they "are the perfect couple based solely on looks." Celeste is the self-proclaimed "zookeeper" to Ford's "tranquilized bear." As with all stories of infidelity, there is much more brimming beneath the surface.

  My real problem with Ford is actually his age. Ford, like the husbands of most women who marry for money, is far too old. Since I'm twenty-six myself, it's true that he and I are close peers. But thirty-one is roughly seventeen years past my window of sexual interest.

  With that the first page of the novel ends, readers quickly calculates the ideal age, drops their jaws, and quickly turn to the next page. The honest readers, that is. Nutting's writing is wonderfully tactile creating a swampy miasma of sex, sweat, desperation, and fury which washes over us, and becomes only slightly bearable, as it does for the novel's characters, when the air-conditioning is turned on. When Celeste is exhausted and cooling down, we get the brief opportunity to shed the layers of grime, which have been quietly, and stickily accumulating. These are just a few examples of Nutting's recurring and increasingly abrasive descriptive power.

  When aroused:

  Soon I felt so dizzy that I had to kneel down on the shower floor. I clumsily extracted the showerhead from its holder and guided it between my legs, the same way one would put on an oxygen mask that dropped from the plane's ceiling due to an ominous change in cabin pressure, feeling nothing but a frightened hope for survival.

  Shortly afterward, Celeste is triggered by memories of a former student, while out to dinner with her husband. Finding the student's name on a card, she "rips it out on isolation" and excuses herself to the restroom. Upon returning, Celeste sees Ford "drinking yet another blue cocktail overflowing with flora garnish. He'd called from a distance, 'They call this drink a Tall Blue Balls!' I'd given him an appreciative smile, as if to say, How appropriate; you are foul to me and I just wallpapered my cervix with the name of a teenage boy." He's just one. There are others.

  The teenage boy who changes everything is Jack Patrick. For Celeste, "he was at the very last link of androgyny that puberty would permit him: undeniably male but not man... the way his frame shunned both fat and muscle. It had not yet been wrestled into a fixed shape." That's the opening of chapter two. If you haven't consented (a tricky term given this book's subject matter) at this point, you're locked in. Things get darker, dirtier, and more distressing with every flip of the page. It's worth pointing out that these become increasingly harried; any more on Jack Patrick would be a grave spoilage. The strength and brute power of Tampa's whirlwind 272 pages comes not just from Nutting's style but also its juxtaposition with noiresque trappings. It's James M. Cain, but with cell phones and Corvettes. Celeste's cynicism and sardonic, gimlet view make her speak fluent, albeit calcified, Hammetian. She's gifted with the body and destructive properties of the femme fatale. These are Nutting's antecedents, and not Nabokov, regardless of the temptation to compare.

  Tampa's strength comes from the strong, irrevocably female perspective, which keeps the blood pumping in its heart of darkness. As a result, interestingly, easily stereotyped issues like beauty (and using it as currency), love, sexual relations, family, and so forth are turned on their head. A favorite example of this is Celeste's almost fond memory of college defecation and its ties to beauty.

  Shitting is good this way as well. Occasionally in college, my roommate would enter the bathroom right after I'd done some business and scream out at the lingering smell with a sense of shock that left me deeply gratified... I had a face that denied excretion.

  Celeste is the desirous, eternally horny, speed-loving, cynical, dismissive, greedy, shrewd role that the man usually plays in these circumstances. That's the thing. Tampa can seem familiar on a bare-bones level, but Nutting is doing something that yields plenty of twists and turns. Moreover, we readers are pressed against the glass and forced to consider our own desires, as we are exposed to Celeste's. Another caveat: the book is covered in something approximate to velvet. As you flip through each page, increasingly horrified, you find that your hands are beginning to slip. When you consider that it may be responsive, but not in the way you at first assumed, the book becomes even more troubling.

  Tampa by Alissa Nutting
  Ecco
  ISBN: 978-0062280541
  272 pages

  Buy this book >>>

Word Count