Ally Glass-Katz reviews Made for Love

Ecco, 2017. 320 pp. $26.99 (cloth)

The Cincinnati Review will, in most issues, publish multiple reviews of the same book in the hope of presenting a rich and disparate commentary on the work.

Overabundance in Made for Love

Alissa Nutting’s Made for Love is concerned with a would-be surveillance state, a place so eerily familiar yet unfamiliar that upon finishing the novel I canceled my order for Bluetooth headphones, worried they would lead to a chip in my brain similar to the one Hazel, Nutting’s bumbling protagonist, receives (nonconsensually) from her tech-mogul husband, Byron Gogol. Every twenty-four hours, this chip sends Byron a download of everything Hazel has seen and thought, the dystopian equivalent of a Snapchat or an Instagram story.

Distortion is what Nutting does best. She transforms our dependencies—on technology, digital memory, and each other—into warnings that we’ve veered off course. In doing so, she raises questions: How do we experience something we know one hundred others, or in Kim Kardashian’s case one hundred million others, can view on loop for a full day? Can we live a moment in our lives multiple times, or does it dull each time we watch it, so that by the end of the day it’s as if we have not lived at all? What happens when someone watches these moments without our explicit consent? Have we, fraternizing with technology and power, made the same mistakes as Nutting’s protagonists?

These might seem like heady questions. That’s because Made for Love is a heady book. It warns us about the dangers of commodity fetishism, sexual fetishism, and the eavesdropping capacities of devices like the Amazon Echo—all while making us laugh. It is, in short, a smart and reflective novel that narrates a panoptic world populated by characters who, like us, do not want to believe privacy is lost (although, Nutting argues, it probably is).

While staying in a motel, a staple setting in both of the two main plots, Hazel has “an idea that one safe way to interact with people would be to make a fake social media account for an imaginary cute pet, like a guinea pig or a puppy. But even this seemed possibly too risky. What if the account became super popular and then was exposed as a hoax, the pictures all borrowed, and a nationwide hunt to find the deceptive human responsible for the account ensued?” Hazel’s anxiety seems ridiculous until we remember that a few chapters earlier, Jasper, the book’s other central character, is assaulted by a dolphin, and his ensuing escape is caught on cell-phone cameras, bringing him internet fame so extreme he can no longer work as a con man.

By echoing Hazel’s anxiety with a “real” moment in Jasper’s parallel narrative, the book clamors for its readers to pay attention, to recognize that if Hazel’s seemingly unfounded fear can become real for Jasper, our seemingly unfounded fears can materialize for us too. Nutting gracefully entwines the two plots with a hookup in a hot tub, a setting which, like Nutting’s motels, enters the realm of the uncanny. We can’t recognize the place, but can’t not recognize it either. As in George Saunders’s work, Nutting takes what we accept as normal and morphs it slightly to warn us how close we are to dystopia.

At a different historical moment, this alteration could feel heavy- handed. But the current American political climate seems ripe for warnings. Logging onto Twitter in December 2017, I find Margaret Atwood retweeting Newspeak-like terms to replace government-banned words and William Gibson posting a video on how rubber bands get made, followed by a tweet that “science that isn’t evidence-based isn’t science.”

It is as if Made for Love is in conversation with Atwood, Gibson, and the distracting phenomenon of internet videos. Nutting’s dystopia is not concerned with fascist government but with an America in which there is so little government regulation that corporations can be fascist. Byron’s tech-empire seems to follow no rule of law. He can stalk, survey, and, Hazel fears, kill.

Nutting’s sweeping reflections are effective for two reasons: The book is funny, and her protagonists wrestle with the same things we all do, including love, sex, loneliness, capitalism, technology, “vulgar sexual interspecies obsession,” and even a plastic flamingo encountered while drunk and stumbling home to a sex-doll-filled trailer.

Okay, mostly what we all do.

Reading Made for Love, I find it easy to imagine the corners of the internet dedicated to the acquisition of these sex dolls (and the variations of kink they explore), which I think is part of Nutting’s point. In her near-future 2019, we’re constantly watched, from shower drains in seedy motels or projections of tech-billionaire husbands in ceiling fans, and while we’re watched, we’re looking—for love, for companionship, for meaning—because capitalism and technology have made us very much misunderstood.

When Hazel meets Byron, she thinks his “wealth and power” seem like a “terrifying glimpse of the infinite,” but “marriage to an eccentric tech multimillionaire” plays out more like a horror movie than a romantic comedy. Nutting has Hazel’s father make a similar mistake. He buys a sex doll because he doesn’t want to hurt a living person if he suffers a heart attack during sex. He believes he can “die on top of Diane as much as [he] want[s].”

At times, Made for Love reads like a reimagining of Fifty Shades of Grey. Indeed, Nutting is no stranger to the literary allusion. Her first novel Tampa reconsidered Lolita, casting middle-school teacher Celeste Price in the Humbert Humbert role. Nutting seems most at ease destabilizing familiar narratives, and these days, no genre is more familiar than the one in which controlling, abusive tech megalomaniacs seduce “normal” women. But while Lolita is a good enough book to warrant aesthetic reconsideration (see: Padgett Powell’s “Trick or Treat”), Fifty Shades of Grey is not.

Scale, then, is Made for Love’s biggest issue. In using so many simu- lacra (lifted from Fifty Shades of Grey, Black Mirror, Frankenstein, Joy Williams, Milan Kundera, Willa Cather, Lord Byron, and the labyrinth- like turns of Mark Zuckerberg’s private life), Nutting risks submerging her readers in so many referential minutiae that they might miss out on her substantive narrative skill.

Her protagonists’ problems become the book’s problems—neither Hazel nor Jasper can escape their personal issues, and the novel can’t escape the cloistered realm of the hyperpersonal and referential. Books can be as small as their authors want. But Nutting’s novel feels like it’s striving to be big—the dual plots, the thriller aspects, the huge thematic ideas of class, technology, loss, and love—and using Fifty Shades as a springboard sells the thing short.

Early in the novel, Hazel becomes entranced by her father’s sex doll, reaching deep inside her mouth and catching her arm there. To free herself, she tries “submerging Diane’s head in hot water to see if it made the doll’s rubber throat any stretchier.” This doesn’t work. Hazel dislocates her shoulder and needs both her father and a potential suitor to free her. Nutting’s submersion in simulacra does not work either. Her story ends up so steeped in references that it is di∞cult for the fantastic writing and thoughtful plotting to resonate as they should.

For Nutting, the problem of writing a book in 2017 seems to be that everything’s been said. What is there to do? Start a new wave of fiction-language-poetics? Or pack a novel so full of references that it becomes Made for Love? The danger of the latter choice is that it makes Nutting’s work feel like it’s arguing for a place in the culture, rather than taking one, as I think it deserves.

Some novels exist outside of time. Others are written for a particular moment, like this one, in which we are so inundated with technology that we, like Hazel, are at risk for secreting ourselves away in a motel room, because there, at least, we can “walk on all fours.” This desire to be close to the ground, to do something animalistic, runs through the book, and I urge you to take to the floor upon finishing Made for Love. You might find a lost quarter or experience a poignant moment while contemplating the back of your hands.

Read more from Issue 15.1.