NOTHING SPECIAL, by Nicole FlatteryIn the Irish writer Nicole Flattery’s exquisitely disorienting debut novel, “Nothing Special,” Mae, the daughter of an alcoholic waitress, spends her youth in 1960s New York City riding up and down department store escalators, getting nowhere except deeper into her own dissatisfaction.
What she does do is observe, and the one thing that is clear is the rapacity of her speculation.
She subjects her world and the people who populate it to a ravenous metamorphosing, a proxy for the closeness she craves and fears.
As she listens, she grows closer to the disembodied voices, and to the revealing silences in between, than to anyone else around her.
“It felt like my life had been reduced to nothing but the tapes, that I no longer recognized the sound of my own voice,” Mae narrates.
Persons:
Nicole, Nicole Flattery’s, ” Mae, ”, Mae, “, —, Andy Warhol’s, she’s
Locations:
New York City