Ah, you might say if you only glimpsed a review or two of Nicole Flattery’s debut novel, Nothing Special, a novel about Andy Warhol. Cool. I’ll check that out. Except Nothing Special isn’t a novel about Andy Warhol. It’s a novel that takes place in the same milieu as Andy Warhol, in which Andy Warhol casts a long shadow, but it isn’t a novel about Andy Warhol. No sir.
Nothing Special is a novel about Mae. Mae is a mess. We meet Mae as a teenager and as a grown up years later (and yes, we thought, vexed, heaven help us, is this another novel told in two time frames that converge somewhere in the middle? Wonderfully, it isn’t. Flattery sets us up with a little back and forth and then reposes for three quarters of the book in the company of the young Mae. The structure is wonderfully subverting. Is that what you expect, it says? The by now cliched back and forth? Well, you’re not having it. Thank you we say).
Mae messes up school. Messes up her friendship with Maud (or is betrayed, depending on your sympathy for Mae). Rants, rages and rails at her mother. Throws away her virginity on a nothing much man whose mother treats her to a session with a doctor she favours, only for the doctor to throw Mae in the path of some work. The work (Warhol was always fond of calling it the work, apparently) is secretarial, to begin with.
She finds herself in a place (not once called the Factory), where louche young men sprawl on couches, where women sit around looking beautiful. She is asked to type. Gradually she befriends another young woman called Shelley (and possibly there is some competition between them, loosely, because does the Factory really need two young women who can type?). If Nothing Special could be said to be about anything (and forgive us for being so gauche as to want to be able to describe what happens in the book), it’s about Mae’s relationship with Shelley. Or Mae’s relationship with her mother. Or, at a push, Mae’s relationship with Ondine, one of Warhol’s superstars (not that Mae has a relationship with Ondine anywhere but in her own mind).
The backdrop to the book, if you need it, is that Warhol once wrote a novel called A based upon the transcription of a day in the Factory. Four women allegedly transcribed it, two of whom have been lose to history. We presume the two that have been lost are Mae and Shelley. Flattery gives them wonderful life. Of course (didn’t you know it?), Nothing Special is very special. The writing has the detached coolness of DeLillo and sentences fall over themselves in their quotability. It’s why we’re not quoting from it. We can be contrary too. Read it yourself.
Any Cop?: Although we spent much of the book wondering (the way we did with Otessa Moshfegh’s Eileen) just where is this going, it’s still a ride, we still enjoyed it hugely, we would still recommend it to your grasping hands.
Bookmunch 