Made for Love

April 17, 2017
As she did in Tampa, her first novel about an eighth-grade teacher’s affair with a student, Nutting deftly exploits the comic potential of perverse attachments, here to sex dolls, aquatic mammals, and technological devices. Readers of Dave Eggers’s The Circle will be familiar with Nutting’s caricature of an ominous and ubiquitous technology giant, Gogol Industries, though this cautionary tale packs the profane punch of satirists like Carl Hiaasen. The story begins after a woman, Hazel, has fled her controlling husband, Byron, a cold-blooded, germaphobic, and distinctly un-Byronic tech titan who “treated his electronics like lesser wives.” Hazel takes refuge in her father’s trailer park home, vastly different from her former lodging, “the Hub,” Byron’s sterile compound that is at once a prison, spa, and hospital. Living with her father and his recently purchased sex doll, Hazel hopes to avoid Byron’s near-omniscient gaze and forge a new, unsurveilled, and thrillingly unhygienic life. Elsewhere Jasper, a handsome hustler whose two great joys are “sex and conning people out of money,” has a bizarre encounter with a dolphin, kindling in him an unquenchable cross-species desire. Though Jasper’s zany plot strand eventually ties into Hazel’s story and touches on relevant themes of anonymity and objectification, it never fully works. Nonetheless, the novel charms in its witty portrait of a woman desperate to reconnect with her humanity.

May 1, 2017
A glimpse into the future--which looks a lot like the present--from the author of Tampa (2013) and Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls (2011)."Hazel's 76-year-old father had bought a doll. A life-size woman doll. The kind designed to provide a sexual experience that came as close as possible to having sex with a living (or maybe, Hazel thought, a more apt analogy was a very-very-recently deceased) female." These are the first lines of Nutting's second novel (her first book was a collection of short fiction). They are attention-getting, certainly, and the mix of barefaced candor and mordant humor will be familiar to the author's fans, as will the deeply flawed protagonist. Hazel was well on her way to becoming a standard-issue screw-up when she met tech billionaire Byron Gogol. When the story begins, she's trying to escape her marriage to Byron--and hoping to avoid being assassinated by her obsessive spouse. Much of the novel is set in 2019, after Hazel has left her husband, but there are flashbacks to her courtship--if we can call it that--and life in Byron's compound. There's also a parallel story about Jasper, a con artist who develops a sexual and romantic attachment to dolphins after a male bottlenose tries to rape him. Nutting's prose style is distinctive, and the narrative is shot through with her inventive language, and she's adept at creating darkly absurd situations. But character-building is not among her strengths. Hazel never quite emerges as a fully formed person, which makes it hard to remain interested in her. The same goes for Jasper. And this novel's pacing is uneven and, ultimately, unsatisfying. While Nutting borrows plot elements from thrillers, narrative momentum is constantly undercut by back story and scenes that are odd and amusing but not entirely necessary. An uneven effort from a terrific writer.

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May 15, 2017
Hazel is on the run from the one person she might not be able to escape: her tech-mogul husband, Byron, whose company, Gogol, is far-reaching and powerful. Hazel flees the pristine Gogol complex for her 76-year-old father's trailer, where she is shocked to find that her father is shacking up with a sex doll he has christened Diane. Even more problematic than her father's desire to be alone with his new, fake paramour is the disturbing discovery that Byron has inserted a chip into Hazel's head that allows him to download her memories every day. Byron wants Hazel back, and he is willing to do anything to get her to return to him, whether it's viewing her memories or dropping a virtual bomb on her with facts about her father's health. Just as she did in her first novel, Tampa (2013), Nutting pushes boundariesthis time via a subplot with a charming con man who finds himself attracted to dolphinsand though it's not as grounded as her debut, Nutting's second outing offers up a sly satire of our tech- and prosperity-obsessed society.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)