Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special (Bloomsbury, 2023).
Nothing Special, by Nicole Flattery. Bloomsbury, 2023. 240 pages.
A BRIGHT AND TROUBLED INGENUE has made it to New York City. What now? Nicole Flattery’s debut novel—the Irish writer’s first book was a short-story collection, Show Them a Good Time (2019)—is artfully withholding at the levels of period language and the particularities of its setting. But its protagonist, Mae, who is seventeen in 1967, arrives with obvious narrative precursors: the Joan Didion of “Goodbye to All That;” Sylvia Plath’s stand-in, Esther Greenwood, in The Bell Jar; Therese Belivet in Patricia Highsmith’s Carol (née The Price of Salt). Even Peggy Olson in Mad Men. Mae dresses up just to ride department-store escalators, picks up a young man at Macy’s, has an uncomfortable encounter with his mother the next morning. A comedy of midcentury coming-of-age cliché seems about to unfold, when a creepy doctor (“make yourself available,” he tells her) recommends Mae go work for a certain artist—in a studio where every surface is covered with silver foil.
Andy Warhol’s a, A Novel was published in January 1968. The book derives from tape recordings made during a single day in 1965, featuring various Factory regulars: notably the speeding, garrulous Ondine (Robert Olivo). The text is a phatic scramble of conversation, both frank and redacted. It partakes of Warhol’s self-declared machinic ambitions, the urge to become a recording medium by which his subjects would flatly register. (In advance galleys of Nothing Special, Flattery included an epigraph from the artist: “The acquisition of my tape recorder really finished whatever emotional life I might have had, but I was glad to see it go.”) The tape recordings, like Warhol’s silkscreens, required hours of labor. They were transcribed by Susan Pile, Pat Hackett, Moe Tucker (the Velvet Underground drummer refused to type the word “fuck”), and, so the biographies tell us, a couple of teenaged girls drafted for the task. The fictional Mae is one of these; their real names remain unknown to Warhol scholarship and Factory lore alike.
“Behind us life was technically happening, but we had no part in it.” Accompanied by the seemingly worldly runaway Shelley and overseen by the uptight Anita, Mae hammers all day at her typewriter, and imagines she is laboring toward a new life: “It was possible I could kill the person I had been by doing the right work, by producing, by impressing these people.” Cruel optimism, essence of youth, even (or especially) in a coterie that prides itself on cynical distance from conventional goals and sympathies. A passive Warholian observer despite herself, Mae watches as Shelley is humiliated before Warhol’s movie camera, Edie Sedgwick breaks down and is institutionalized, and lesser stars diminish: “Some of them were poor, and getting poorer.”
Warhol himself is a spectral, intermittent presence in Nothing Special. (The novel’s title comes from an unmade TV show Warhol planned in the early 1970s.) Easy to imagine a half-seduced but more directly satirical portrait of “Drella” and his anxious retinue. Or to think of Mae as a generational gatecrasher and spy, exposing the phonies in the same way she notices that the Factory’s gleaming surfaces are flaking off. But Flattery’s real subject is not this overly familiar scene and its grubby realities, rather it is a consciousness contending with time, trying to figure if she’s really living in the present or has fully grasped the shifts in herself and the culture around her. You can hear this, I think, in the baby-Didion register Mae adopts when describing a period that would only much later resolve into “the ’60s”: “Young people everywhere were treating adults with bare contempt. Girls with ugly haircuts smiled condescendingly.” And later, recalling the self-mythologizing of the 1960s and 1970s: “We hurtled through those two decades like falling from a high window.”
Where does such a tone come from? In part from the now middle-aged Mae, who frames her superstar-adjacent months with reflections on her impossible mother—an alcoholic waitress with whom she’s belatedly reconciled—and her mother’s partner Mikey. (Warhol’s own mother, Julia Warhola, is here too, bustling around Bloomingdale’s with Mae—“gone to Bloomingdale’s” was how he later euphemized her death.) But it’s also the sound of Flattery refusing to be misled either by the picturesque details of 1967 or by the stylistic possibilities for a novel that Warhol and his art propose. In a “note on the sources,” she calls a, A Novel “a fascinating, stubborn, enduring work”—but it’s not the model for Flattery’s version of aesthetic flatness.
It may be that Nothing Special is no more tonally subdued, no more resistant to seeming like a lot, than most contemporary fiction. But there does appear to be a great deal of deliberate subtraction going on. At times, the language is keenly tuned to its milieu. “Sorry for not having more problems,” Mae says. “Problems” is a very Warhol word—it was their problems that made Factory people worth having around. Elsewhere in the novel, however, there’s a studied reserve: Specifics place and time are suppressed so consistently that we might wonder if we’re in New York, or the 1960s, at all. Flattery’s style and word choices can seem all wrong. When did people start saying “phone sex”? (A decade later, it seems.) Is “advert” in place of “ad” an accident or intentional shift to Irish or British usage? Does a typewriter’s carriage-return bell signal what Mae (or Flattery) seems to think it does (the end of a page)?
I mention these small oddities not to upbraid Flattery for a failure of realism or lack of attention to the texture of Mae’s time. Instead to suggest that the seventeen-year-old typist is a sort of time traveler. Sitting all day at her keyboard, with her headphones on, trying hard to impress her employers but unconvinced by the utility or interest of her task: Mae seems very much a figure from the twenty-first-century workplace, perhaps even specifically the post-pandemic one. She sees that the Factory is after all a factory, and its stars are really laborers: “The more I listened, the more it seemed like being Ondine was a lot of work.” Instead of a historical novel immersed in storied glamour and squalid celebrity, Flattery has written a book about the fascinations of work and the exhaustion of dreams.
Brian Dillon’s Affinities, Suppose a Sentence, and Essayism are published by New York Review Books. He is writing a book about Kate Bush’s album Hounds of Love, and another on aesthetic education.