Nicole Flattery’s Warholian Bildungsroman – Artforum Worldwide

Nothing Particular, by Nicole Flattery. Bloomsbury, 2023. 240 pages.

A BRIGHT AND TROUBLED INGENUE has made it to New York Metropolis. What now? Nicole Flattery’s debut novel—the Irish author’s first ebook was a short-story assortment, Present Them a Good Time (2019)—is artfully withholding on the ranges of interval language and the particularities of its setting. However its protagonist, Mae, who’s seventeen in 1967, arrives with apparent 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 Worth of Salt). Even Peggy Olson in Mad Males. Mae clothes up simply to experience department-store escalators, picks up a younger man at Macy’s, has an uncomfortable encounter along with his mom the subsequent morning. A comedy of midcentury coming-of-age cliché appears about to unfold, when a creepy physician (“make your self obtainable,” he tells her) recommends Mae go work for a sure artist—in a studio the place each floor is roofed with silver foil.

Andy Warhol’s a, A Novel was printed in January 1968. The ebook derives from tape recordings made throughout a single day in 1965, that includes varied Manufacturing facility regulars: notably the dashing, garrulous Ondine (Robert Olivo). The textual content is a phatic scramble of dialog, each frank and redacted. It partakes of Warhol’s self-declared machinic ambitions, the urge to turn into a recording medium by which his topics would flatly register. (Upfront galleys of Nothing Particular, Flattery included an epigraph from the artist: “The acquisition of my tape recorder actually completed no matter emotional life I may need had, however I used to be glad to see it go.”) The tape recordings, like Warhol’s silkscreens, required hours of labor. They have been transcribed by Susan Pile, Pat Hackett, Moe Tucker (the Velvet Underground drummer refused to sort the phrase “fuck”), and, so the biographies inform us, a few teenaged ladies drafted for the duty. The fictional Mae is certainly one of these; their actual names stay unknown to Warhol scholarship and Manufacturing facility lore alike.

“Behind us life was technically taking place, however we had no half 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 towards a brand new life: “It was potential I may kill the particular person I had been by doing the fitting work, by producing, by impressing these individuals.” Merciless optimism, essence of youth, even (or particularly) in a coterie that prides itself on cynical distance from typical targets and sympathies. A passive Warholian observer regardless of herself, Mae watches as Shelley is humiliated earlier than Warhol’s film digital camera, Edie Sedgwick breaks down and is institutionalized, and lesser stars diminish: “A few of them have been poor, and getting poorer.”

Warhol himself is a spectral, intermittent presence in Nothing Particular. (The novel’s title comes from an unmade TV present Warhol deliberate within the early Seventies.) Simple to think about a half-seduced however extra instantly satirical portrait of “Drella” and his anxious retinue. Or to consider Mae as a generational gatecrasher and spy, exposing the phonies in the identical method she notices that the Manufacturing facility’s gleaming surfaces are flaking off. However Flattery’s actual topic is just not this overly acquainted scene and its grubby realities, somewhat it’s a consciousness contending with time, making an attempt to determine if she’s actually residing within the current or has absolutely grasped the shifts in herself and the tradition round her. You possibly can hear this, I feel, within the baby-Didion register Mae adopts when describing a interval that might solely a lot later resolve into “the ’60s”: “Younger individuals in every single place have been treating adults with naked contempt. Ladies with ugly haircuts smiled condescendingly.” And later, recalling the self-mythologizing of the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies: “We hurtled by these 20 years like falling from a excessive window.”

The place does such a tone come from? Partly from the now middle-aged Mae, who frames her superstar-adjacent months with reflections on her unattainable mom—an alcoholic waitress with whom she’s belatedly reconciled—and her mom’s companion Mikey. (Warhol’s personal mom, Julia Warhola, is right here too, bustling round Bloomingdale’s with Mae—“gone to Bloomingdale’s” was how he later euphemized her dying.) However it’s additionally the sound of Flattery refusing to be misled both by the picturesque particulars of 1967 or by the stylistic potentialities for a novel that Warhol and his artwork suggest. In a “be aware on the sources,” she calls a, A Novel “a captivating, cussed, enduring work”—but it surely’s not the mannequin for Flattery’s model of aesthetic flatness.

It might be that Nothing Particular isn’t any extra tonally subdued, no extra proof against seeming like loads, than most up to date fiction. However there does seem like quite a lot of deliberate subtraction occurring. At occasions, the language is keenly tuned to its milieu. “Sorry for not having extra issues,” Mae says. “Issues” is a really Warhol phrase—it was their issues that made Manufacturing facility individuals price having round. Elsewhere within the novel, nonetheless, there’s a studied reserve: Specifics place and time are suppressed so persistently that we would surprise if we’re in New York, or the Nineteen Sixties, in any respect. Flattery’s type and phrase selections can appear all unsuitable. When did individuals begin saying “cellphone intercourse”? (A decade later, it appears.) Is “advert” instead of “advert” an accident or intentional shift to Irish or British utilization? Does a typewriter’s carriage-return bell sign what Mae (or Flattery) appears to assume it does (the tip of a web page)?

I point out these small oddities to not upbraid Flattery for a failure of realism or lack of consideration to the feel of Mae’s time. As a substitute to counsel that the seventeen-year-old typist is a kind of time traveler. Sitting all day at her keyboard, along with her headphones on, making an attempt onerous to impress her employers however unconvinced by the utility or curiosity of her activity: Mae appears very a lot a determine from the twenty-first-century office, even perhaps particularly the post-pandemic one. She sees that the Manufacturing facility is in spite of everything a manufacturing facility, and its stars are actually laborers: “The extra I listened, the extra it appeared like being Ondine was loads of work.” As a substitute of a historic novel immersed in storied glamour and squalid superstar, Flattery has written a ebook concerning the fascinations of labor and the exhaustion of desires.

Brian Dillon’s Affinities, Suppose a Sentence, and Essayism are printed by New York Assessment Books. He’s writing a ebook about Kate Bush’s album Hounds of Love, and one other on aesthetic training.