The Prettiest Pedophile: A Belated Review of "Tampa" by Alissa Nutting

To begin, let's agree on four points: 

1. The cover of Tampa, Alissa Nutting's debut novel, is a vagina. 
2. That's one of the reasons you bought this book. 
3. As proud as you are to have a trade paperback novel with a vagina on the cover, when you read this book on the train, you're careful to fold back the cover so no one discovers you're reading a novel with a vagina on the cover. Not that there's anything wrong with vaginas.
4. When I say You I mean I.

Tampa, from the author of the short story collection Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls (I haven't read it) is the story of a wildly attractive 26-year-old nymphomaniac who teaches middle school. Not by accident, either. She can only get off, and get off she does quite frequently over the course of the book, when she is fantasizing or actualizing a sexual scenario with an innocent, barely pubescent middle school boy, for reasons she explains quite thoroughly in the book. She is a pedophile. Actually, a hebophile is more accurate (hebophilia, Wikipedia informs me, is a sexual attraction to a person in early adolescence, in the early part of the transition to physical/sexual maturity).

For the record, with or without its explicit cover, I thought this was a great read, one of my favorite novels of the last few years. And no, the hebophiliac erotica that pervades this work is not the reason for my fascination with Nutting's story.

Debra Lafave, Inspiration for Celeste Price in Tampa

The novel is more than a little bit reminiscent--and presumably inspired by--the 2005 case of sexual predator school teacher Debra Lafave, the so-called "hot pedophile" (quoth the internet) arrested for four sexual encounters with, you guessed it, a 14-year-old student. Ms. Lafave (her former married name) cut a deal with Florida prosecutors and served house arrest and probation instead of up to 30 years jail  time if the case had gone to a full trial.

Naturally, the Lafave case comes up quite a bit in the course of the many print and online discussions of Nutting's novel, which was released in 2013 to a great deal of fanfare and predictable levels of controversy and uncalled-for Nabakov comparisons. I'd say Tampa bears far more resemblance to American Psycho than it does to 20th century classic Lolita. Either way, the real-life comparisons do a disservice to the novel, which I believe is far more significant and important a work than its many critics believe. I'll get to why in a few moments.

The reviews of this book are decidedly mixed. As of this writing, the trade paperback of the novel has about 3.5 stars on Amazon, based on 216 ratings. A significant number call the book excellent, a few middling, and a great number offer quite scathing reviews, not only for the taboo/arguably reprehensible subject. 

Professional reviews have not been entirely kind, either. A Guardian review calls it "barren" and "unedifying." The Tampa Bay Times ("Winner of Ten Pulitzer Prizes") calls it "dirty and dull." Amazon reviews blast it for its lack of character depth--Celeste Prize is called "not a character but a caricature." People are generally quite pleased with the quality of writing--Nutting's a consummate stylist, her metaphors absolutely spot-on, her protagonist's narration both witty and ruthless, a testament to the character's/author's fierce intelligence. 

However, I believe most readers go into this novel looking for a fictionalized portrayal of the Debra Lafave case (and there are certainly enough similarities to warrant that expectation). But I argue that readers should not look at Tampa as a documentarian exploration of the mind of a sociopathic pedophile but rather a send up, a satire, of a very sick modern culture that simultaneously encourages sexual fantasies of the sort that give Ms. Price her power while discouraging the actualization of said fantasies. Society makes Ms. Price an object to be desired (a conception she works hard to cultivate) but also a forbidden fantasy. 

Isn't there a Motley Crue song about this?

I feel that people who criticize Nutting for failing to capture the complexity of the child molester may also fault Jonathan Swift for failing to capture the complex mentality of the baby-eater (see: "A Modest Proposal"). In my view, Nutting's novel is to our over-sexualizing-yet-violently-represed culture what Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho is to 80s greed and unbridled capitalism. The real character here is the surrounding culture, not the admittedly flat protagonist. Is Celeste Price a caricature? Absolutely, and that's completely appropriate for a story like this. 

Perhaps if this novel were told from a different point of view--maybe a close or middle-distance third-person narrator?--we would have a better sense of the socio-cultural context that makes Tampa in the end a very insightful novel. 

Notes on S P R A W L

I want to talk about S P R A W L, a fascinating work of innovative prose by Danielle Dutton, an instructor at the Jack Kerouac School (where I studied). I don't actually know Ms. Dutton, but I heard her at a reading and was immediately enamored with her funny, eccentric, surprising sentences. It is rare that I enjoy a prose reading; for some reason, it's easier for me to listen to poetry being read aloud. But whatever it was Ms. Dutton was reading commanded my attention more than anything else being read that evening.

So I bought her book, years later, and read it.

What is S P R A W L? A lot of things, I guess. A commentary on suburbia, on marriage, on the structures and norms of domestic life. S P R A W L could be called a monograph, a story, a novella, or simply a really long paragraph. It could be called fiction, or more likely, a work of innovative (experimental? whatever that means) prose.

If this book has a plot, I don't know what it is. Plotlessness is a complaint often lodged against particularly complex or heady books (David Foster Wallace's novels come readily to mind). The single-paragraph story--it's really just one long paragraph--is a seeming hodgepodge of first-person impressions. The narrator, a suburban woman, cooks dinner and dances around the sidewalk and writes (imaginary, unsent?) letters to her neighbors. The book is a series of fragments that, pieced together, don't seem to adhere to any larger plot structure.

So if it doesn't have a plot, is it a story? Sure, why not. It is, after all, a narrative (all prose works, and arguably poems, too, possess a narrative through-line, even without a superstructure like we associate with most fiction). This book, like much so-called innovative or experimental (whatever that is) fiction doesn't operate so much as a whole but as a collection of individually crafted, independent sentences.

My tentative thesis: if traditional fiction operates on the level of the book, the chapter, or the paragraph, innovative prose pieces operate at the level of the sentence.

For Ms. Dutton, each sentence should be read and swallowed and digested separately from its neighboring sentences; the author crafts her sentences with such wit and lapidary intensity that the parts overwhelm the whole. Why would you want to see the forest when its individual trees are already so spectacular?

An example, chosen at random:

In the morning, over coffee and eggs, I'm exhorted to be an individual. In the afternoon we wash our cars. The cat climbs in and out of empty boxes in the hall. I sleep with the window open and imagine. (98)

Four sentences, each portraying a different scene, a different set of impressions and concerns. The whole book is like this, really; an assemblage of disparate life-segments, memories in the making. Even though this book is written in the present tense, it seems to operate the way memory does: in fragments and non sequiturs.

I want to try writing sentences the way Ms. Dutton does. Here are mine:

My wife points out that older cats are less likely to be adopted than kittens. I drink my coffee and pick crust from my eyes. On the train to work I try to get inside the head of a shoe fetishist; does anyone fetishize flats or must they have heels? The secret to weight loss is portion control, everybody says. 

That was tough. My sentences kept slipping into one another.