Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery: coming-of-age tale of Warhol Factory girl

Nicole Flattery’s first novel is set in the mid-1960s, a time when “Young people everywhere were treating adults with bare contempt ... trying out new facial expressions that their parents didn’t understand”. Seventeen-year-old Mae drops out of school and takes a job as a typist and general hanger-on with Andy Warhol’s louche New York entourage. She and her colleague, Shelley, are charged with transcribing many hours’ worth of interviews conducted during the set’s notoriously hedonistic parties, for eventual publication in a book. Mae becomes obsessed with the audio recordings, using them as inspiration for her own personal reinvention: “practiced disinterest was something I learnt from the tapes ... I was a whole new girl.”

Mae hails from a dysfunctional household; she doesn’t get on with her mum, and looks down on her because she worked in a diner for much of her life. When Shelley observes that Mae doesn’t tend to talk to waitresses when they’re out together, Mae concedes: “I didn’t want to see them, and recognise something severe and lost in them I knew from my mother.” Her yearning to transcend her origins manifests in an almost pathological aversion to anything that hints at ordinariness. A lavender dress “reminded me tragically of pampered mothers, of meanness disguised as generosity, of something unshakeably suburban”. She is particularly distressed to discover that Shelley is brilliant at 10-pin bowling: “‘This game is provincial,’ I said. ‘Is this why you left? because they made you spend your Friday nights doing this?’”

Recounting these events from the vantage point of middle age, Mae is more forgiving of her mother: “Everything I’d mistaken for cruelty had been disappointment, heightened emotion with no release, a desire for human contact she wasn’t getting.” For the most part, however, the narrative voice is distinctly unsentimental. Her frequent, listlessly cynical reference to stock images – characters are likened to people in advertisements on several occasions; a salad “looked like a picture of a salad you might show a child to make a point” – is an apt motif, given Warhol’s use of commercial ads in his visual art. Mae’s ambivalent camaraderie with Shelley is a sharply rendered study in the “frenemy” dynamic, where admiration is tempered by wariness and even compliments are tinged with condescension: Shelley has a “frantic, wifey purposefulness” and “the innate alertness of the interloper”.

There is little of the freewheeling playfulness that animated Flattery’s impressive 2019 short story collection, Show Them a Good Time. This is a more earnest – and commensurately less fun – work, but there are flashes, here and there, of the droll bathos that is the most charming feature of Flattery’s fiction. They are often throwaway lines, such as a description of the early phase of “uncomplicated early love” as “a period I associated with dehydration and tourism”, or Mae’s admission that “I wasn’t thinking a whole lot about my behaviour, or even considering it behaviour. These were just things I was doing.” This wry, deadpan style sits uneasily within the brooding psychodrama of the overarching storyline – it’s hard to inhabit both modes simultaneously – and the novel’s narrative texture is consequently a little uneven.

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It takes a certain courage to choose Nothing Special as a title for a novel: in the hostage-to-fortune stakes it’s right up there with Bang Average and Not As Good As My Other Book. But it’s fitting, not only as a cruel riff on the protagonist’s aspirations and insecurities, but also because the experience of anticlimax is the essence of her moral journey. Why, indeed, would anyone expect the recorded ramblings of drug-addled wannabes to be anything other than dreadfully dull? As the novelty of their glamour wears off, Mae starts to view the partygoers differently, as exploited victims – “‘all here because their mommies and daddies didn’t love them enough’”. This is, in other words, a relatively conventional coming-of-age tale, a story of obsession and mystification giving way to clarity and its inevitable corollary, disillusionment.

Early on in the novel, Flattery’s narrator remarks that “What I always liked more than being inside the gallery was the process of getting in. It’s like an exclusive nightclub, it has the same tension.” This sentiment – and the attendant sense of imminent disappointment – doubles as a neat metaphor for the anxiety of every emerging artistic talent as they negotiate the transition from early promise to maturity. You’ve worked hard to gain admission to the fold, a triumph in itself. Congrats, you’re in. What happens next?