Tampa by Alissa Nutting
My rating: 4/5 cats
hoo boy.
this is one of those books that people are going to have opinions about.and i look forward to people getting all angry and hysterical at me for liking it. for liking it a lot. because the subject matter is pretty ick, right? who is going to be all out and proud saying they liked a book about pedophilia if it doesn’t come from the pen of nabokov? (hebephilia, sure, but still…) but it’s a pretty accomplished book.
i mean, what does it set out to do? it sets out to get you in the head of a sexual predator. well, guess what? success!! you are in there but good. and it is decidedly uncomfortable. this is about “know thy enemy.” and she does. i thought a.m. homes nailed the subject matter with The End of Alice, but this one just takes it one sticky foot further.
and i mean, shit, how many monsterotica books have i read now? it’s not like icky sex is something i shy away from. and i read my monsterporn clinically, because i think they are funny, and the sex just sorta slides off my eyes. and that’s what this is, only it’s more horrifying than funny. i know it’s completely different but it feels like the same level of transgression – people putting their genitals where they have no business being. i mean, really, why would you ever want to have sex with a teenage boy?? they are not sexy, and don’t you have a better use for your three minutes??
so that’s out of the way.
next point: is this just a lay-dee writing a backwards-Lolita? well, yes and no. that is definitely part of the novelty of this …erm, novel, but it is more than that.
someone asked me what this book was about, and i said “pedophilia. it’s about a female teacher who seduces her fourteen-year-old suitor.”
and they said, “oh, that doesn’t count.”
i was intrigued, so i pressed it.
“what do you mean??”
“when you say ‘a pedophile walks into a room,’ and it turns out to be a woman, it’s like ‘what is this, the wnba??”
which cracked me up, but in a way, it kind of illuminates the way we deal with teenage sexuality. we still couch things in those antiquated terms of the slut and the player. little girls are cautioned that they are losing something or giving something up but with boys it is still dealt with in terms of conquest, of rite of passage, of coming of age. and what teenage boy wouldn’t want to sleep with his ultra-hot teacher, given the opportunity? it’s still criminal, but somehow less victim-y.
and, no, i do not have children nor do i deal with them in my day-to-day, but i watch svu, so i know what’s what.
our popular literature is growing darker: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Dinner, Gone Girl, and even Fifty Shades of Grey. this is the shit the world is made of, and our literature reflects it. the reality is that there are beautiful people with sick minds who might not get caught. literature, like life, never promised you justice.
and all
is she a sympathetic character? no way. is she redeemed, is she symbolic, is she punished? nope. but it is a quaint and infantile stance for readers to need to like their protagonists. it’s a little adorable, but it ignores the loooong tradition of the antihero in fiction, and i get really frustrated when i hear people whining that they didn’t like a book because the protagonist was a jerk or a sociopath, or a pedophile. not every book is going to be written by nicholas sparks.
but back to lolita. this is completely different from lolita, in its treatment. lolita was a one-sided love story. this one is about need and obsession. it is eroticism without attachment. she is pure predator consuming what she needs. i’m not sure if that makes this more or less problematic. probably more. i think we are more forgiving with star-crossed, impossible lovers than we are with someone who has an itch to scratch and doesn’t care who gets hurt in the scratching. and it is more realistic this way; more troubling.
she has her compulsions, and she is dangerously able to justify her needs, while allowing that they are “wrong” to the world at large:
Sex struck me as a seafood with the shortest imaginable half-life, needing to be peeled and eaten the moment the urge ripened. Even by sixteen, seventeen, it seemed that people became too comfortable with their desires to have any objectivity over their vulgar movements. They closed their eyes to avoid awkward orgasm faces, slipped lingerie made for models and mannequins onto wholly imperfect bodies. Who was that queen who tried to keep her youth by bathing in the blood of virgins? She should’ve had sex with them instead, or at least had sex with them before killing them. Many might label this a contradiction, but I felt it to be a simple irony: in my view, having sex with teenagers was the only way to keep the act wholesome. They’re observant; they catalogue every detail to obsess upon. They’re obsessive by nature. Should there be any other way to experience sex?I remember taking my shirt off for a friend’s younger brother in college. The way his eyes lit up like he was seeing snow for the first time.
(and i am totally posting text from the ARC, which is a reviewer no-no, but for a book that deals with taboo in such a fearless way, i feel it is apt)
that passage definitely reminds me of that staggeringly good 2-3 pages in Beautiful Losers, where i came dangerously close to understanding the attraction to very young girls. which is just cohen’s power as a writer, and nothing to do with any latent criminality in me.
this a selfish situation because it is not about the act, but about the transgression itself; the taboo. it’s about taking and teaching and uneven power systems.
“I won’t tell,” he said, his arms holding my waist with amateur stiffness. I smiled, thinking about the lover he’d become and all the things he’d try with me for the very first time. I’d be the sexual yardstick for his whole life: Jack would spend the rest of his days trying but failing to relive the experience of being given everything at a time when he knew nothing. Like a tollbooth in his memory, every partner he’d have afterwards would have to pass through the gate of my comparison, and it would be a losing equation. The numbers could never be as favorable as they were right now, when his naivety would be subtracted from my experience to produce the largest sum of astonishment possible.
right there, she inadvertently acknowledges jack’s future difficulties, in his vie sexuelle, but she just does not care.
i understand, intellectually, the desire of taking someone before they have learned anything and imprinting them with what you like, but whooo, those are deep and dark waters.
her lucidity is what is most disturbing, for me. she is so preoccupied with aging, which is par for the course when it comes to beautiful women, but her particular bent will become more difficult as she ages, and she revolts against the betrayal of the body in the aging process:
There was no way for women, for anyone, to gracefully age.After a certain point, any detail like the woman’s cheerleader hairstyle that implied youth simply looked ridiculous. Despite her athletic prowess, the jogger’s cratered thighs seemed more like something that would die one day than something that would not. I didn’t know how long I had before this window slammed down on my fingers as well – with diligence, and avoiding children, perhaps a decade. The older i became, the harder it would be to get what I wanted, but that was probably true of everyone with everything.
and:
I knew I’d find it hard to cut the girls in my classes any slack at all, knowing the great generosity life had already gifted them. They were at the very beginning of their sexual lives with no need to hurry – whenever they were ready, a great range of attractions would be waiting for them, easy and disposable. Their urges would grow up right alongside them like a shadow. They’d never feel their libido a deformed thing to be kept chained up in the attic of their mind and to only be fed in secret after dark.
but there is, occasionally, small moments where there is a glimmer of something potentially salvageable in her:
At times, I wished that my genitals were prosthetic, something I could slip out of.
i do think this is a controversial novel, but it is brilliantly written. and you can get all emotional and “think of teh children,” on it, but that’s not really useful.this is something that happens, and i would rather not live in a cave, wearing blinders, reading nicholas sparks. i wanna be informed.
if this makes no sense, blame the pinot.
