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Andy Warhol as soon as wrote that his “nice unfulfilled ambition” was to have a daily tv program, which he’d name Nothing Particular. His dream present by no means aired, however the Irish author Nicole Flattery nonetheless borrowed its title for her debut novel, which is about largely in Warhol’s Manufacturing facility in 1966. In a February dialog with the Irish Occasions, Flattery admitted that calling her novel Nothing Particular might have been “setting myself up for critics in a really unhealthy approach” — which isn’t wholly mistaken. Nothing Particular is an satisfying novel, astute and at instances propulsive, however it isn’t a particular one. The truth is, regardless of being set in a spot and second that reworked artwork historical past, it’s a up to date story like many others: that of a disaffected younger girl making an attempt halfheartedly to kind out her life.
Disaffected younger ladies have been the first topics of Flattery’s 2018 story assortment Present Them a Good Time, which is about in present-day Eire. It earned important acclaim, and rightly: In it, Flattery’s prose is knife-sharp, displaying her eager eye for the kinds of ugliness that always go unremarked. Nothing Particular is equally within the brutal and banal. Mae, its protagonist, is a high-school dropout based mostly loosely on one of many ladies who, in actual life, typed the tapes — primarily recordings of Warhol talking to his buddy Ondine — that shaped Warhol’s 1986 novel a. Her mom, a waitress with a ingesting downside and a posh love life, appears to have handed alongside her outsized “understanding of human frailty,” which serves Mae nicely in her work. Reasonably than being shocked by the druggy, soiled recordings she transcribes, Mae swiftly sees their energy, which comes from Ondine’s “willingness to be ugly. How enlivening ugliness was, it minimize proper by way of the bullshit.” In Nothing Particular, the identical is usually true. It’s at its greatest in small, hideous moments: an unsavory lover rubbing Mae’s “small, pudgy abdomen … as if I used to be a sick animal,” or the merciless remembered remark that “artwork was what ladies of a sure class took up after they misplaced their appears to be like.”
However Flattery’s curiosity in banality, which regularly is or appears common, retains her from diving into the particularities of Nothing Particular’s context and setting. She’s extremely attuned to particulars that denote social standing — the yellowing partitions in a single house, the expensive rugs in one other — however doesn’t go to any lengths to evoke the visible, historic, or sonic element of Sixties New York. She doesn’t even alter her prose from Irish to American; characters drop the received in you’ve received, set drinks on beer mats slightly than coasters. Small oversights, sure, however it’s from nuance that tone emerges, and in its tone, Nothing Particular is oddly placeless and timeless. Past Warhol and his venture, there’s not a lot to anchor the novel in its second. It turns right into a story of a misplaced woman, washed up in a Manufacturing facility that might, for all its peculiarities, be just about wherever.
Nothing Particular by Nicole Flattery (2023) is printed by Bloomsbury Publishing and is obtainable on-line and in bookstores.
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