Nothing Special

April 1, 2023

DEBUT At 17, Mae is living an aimless and dissatisfied life in 1960s New York. She feels like an outsider at school and is unhappy living at home with her mother, who is addicted to alcohol, and with her mother's on-again, off-again boyfriend Mikey. As Mae searches for some purpose in her life, a series of random events lands her a job in the Factory, artist Andy Warhol's studio, where she works as a typist transcribing tapes for Warhol's book. There she befriends Shelley, another typist, and the two become voyeurs to and peripheral participants in the artistic chaos that is Warhol's loft. Mae becomes increasingly obsessed with what she is transcribing, to the point that the tapes become her entire world. When the transcription is finished, and Mae's role in the Factory is over, she struggles to regain her sense of self. Flattery (author of the story collection Show Them a Good Time) provides a harsh look at the line between art and voyeurism and the struggle to define oneself in a world of overwhelming influences. Given the setting, one would expect vibrant descriptions of 1960s counterculture. Instead, the novel provides an introspective take on the period and, like modern art, forces readers to look inside themselves for the meaning of the broad strokes on the page. VERDICT For fans of literary fiction and coming-of-age stories.--Elisabeth Clark

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April 10, 2023
In the inspired latest from Irish writer Flattery (Show Them a Good Time), a woman looks back on her disaffected youth in 1960s New York City, where she falls into the Andy Warhol scene. In 2010, Mae reflects on her estrangement from her late mother, which intensified in 1966 when Mae was 17 and feeling aliened from family, classmates, and city. She drops out of high school for a secretarial position working for Andy Warhol, and works at his studio with teenage runaway Shelley transcribing two years of Andy’s tape recordings. Invigorated by the work and her friendship with Shelley, Mae feels most connected to the scene while listening to the tapes, believing it’s the “only thing worth doing.” On them, art stars such as Ondine divulge their intimate secrets. Over time, the vanity and voyeurism surrounding Mae prompts her to turn inward, and she starts inserting her own personality into the transcriptions, which drives a wedge between herself and the studio. In a canny move, Warhol’s factory, shown only amorphously, is stripped of the usual mythology and comes across more sweatshop than creative hotbed, a “doll house, with girls arranged everywhere.” Against this gloomy background, a self-possessed Mae tries to find her 15 minutes of fame. Flattery’s fresh take on familiar lore makes this something special indeed. Agent: Tracy Bohan, Wylie Agency.

May 1, 2023
Andy Warhol and his Factory are seen from the disaffected point of view of a teenage typist in Flattery's bleakly funny debut novel. In 1966, 17-year-old Mae, living with a mercurial waitress mother and her mom's sometime boyfriend, is bored with school and alienated from her one friend there. After weeks spent riding department store escalators and a one-night stand with a creepy young businessman, Mae stumbles into a typing gig at Warhol's studio, one for which she is paid only occasionally, when there's some cash lying around. After a brief stint answering phones and typing up letters begging the parents of Warhol's hangers-on for money, she is assigned the task of typing up verbatim a series of tape recordings of conversations in the studio, mostly between Warhol and actor Ondine, which will form a fictionalized version of Warhol's book a, A Novel. Warhol, seldom mentioned by name, is a shadowy presence in the background of the commotion created by his followers, some of whom call him Drella, a combination of Dracula and Cinderella. "Everyone else forgot about the tape recorder," Mae writes. "...Drella never did." The typists themselves play a complicated role in the goings-on, at least in their own minds. "For several hours a day we had all the power. Then we stepped into the real world and had none," Mae thinks. While oddly British locutions--ordinary New Yorkers saying things like "You've a very goofy personality" or "Will we order drinks?"--sometimes threaten the credibility of the novel, it pulls the reader deeply into Mae's increasingly fragile mind, where the desultory, performative conversations she spends her days transcribing threaten her ability to shape a life for herself. Like the conversations the young women transcribe, the novel is a strangely compelling combination of the soporifically mundane and the bracingly odd. Not just for Warhol fans.

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