Margaret Luongo reviews Made for Love

Crawling Toward Authenticity

Alissa Nutting excels at writing unlikable characters. In Tampa, her first novel, a middle-school teacher narrates (in explicit detail) her seduction of a fourteen-year-old student. Celeste Price has no redeeming qualities aside from her humanity, but one comes to understand that as much as she enjoys sex with boys, she feels trapped by her desires and resents others for their “normal” (as she describes them) urges. Subjugated to her desires, Celeste knows she will live in the shadows, impoverished and unable to find reprieve from the thing she fears most: her own decay. She’s not a monster, but a human gone wrong. Aren’t those of us born without such urges fortunate? Celeste is aware of what her life could be and how it will fall far short of basic dignity because she is unable to be anything other than what she is.

In Nutting’s new novel, Made for Love, we meet Hazel Green, the not immediately sympathetic, underachieving protagonist, whose pre-marital existential crisis reeks of entitlement. She expected more from life—preferably with little effort on her part—found nothing, and settled for marriage to a wealthy and powerful man. In retrospect, with painfully won wisdom, Hazel reflects that if she had to rename herself (and she would have to, if she wants to live an aboveboard life), she might choose “Oh Well” or “Should Have Tried.” Hazel’s one talent is faking emotion. She aims to please, supplying people with the reactions she imagines they most want to see, which is how she finds herself married to a mogul and trying to make it work, hoping—for a while—to kindle real feelings.

One could infer that Hazel’s upbringing led her at least partway to her fake-it-till-you-make-it strategy. Hazel recalls a museum visit with her mother when she found the art surprisingly ugly. She remembers asking her mother,

What’s it called when you’re looking at something, I mean staring at something, like how we’re doing, but not at something pretty? That’s the whole reason to stare usually, right? Because something’s beautiful. What about when something isn’t nice to look at but you’re still looking at it and thinking and stuff? She’d watched her mother’s thick brow wrinkle up and push out, which always reminded Hazel of the top of a cardboard milk carton being opened. When you’re looking at something that isn’t nice to look at and thinking? her mother said. Well, that’s called reality, Hazel. That is called L-I-F-E.

Life itself—or her perspective on life—seems to have sapped her mother’s sense of joy. It makes sense that Hazel would strive to avoid being another joy-sapper, would rather fashion herself into a thing easy on the eyes and soul.

At one point Hazel confronts her father, appreciating that though she was never abused, she may have been harmed because her parents didn’t love her—or like her, for that matter. Is Nutting asking us to sympathize? How much are we to blame Hazel’s parents for her crushing adult life, or are more powerful forces at work? Would life have been better for Hazel if only her parents had faked some feeling for her or some enthusiasm for their own lives? Life can often be dull, filled with repetitive activities devoid of meaning. Where would we be without fakery? Hazel partly answers the question, late in the book: “Her enthusiasm was like one of those faux snow machines at a ski resort. For most of her life it had been churning out synthetic delight. It had basically forgotten the original recipe.”

Nutting offers a sliding scale of fakers and nonfakers in her cast of characters, from Hazel’s comically cruel and indifferent parents to Byron Gogol, Hazel’s estranged tech-tycoon husband. Byron values others only as much as they contribute to his empire. At one point, he asks Hazel what her purpose is, knowing full well she has no answer. He offers her as a guinea pig for ultrainvasive Gogol technology. In a sense, Byron is as authentic as they come; though he hides behind the slick veneer of progress, he’s all about accruing power. Liver, an expert in corpse disposal, comes across as the most honorable and trustworthy character, mostly because he eschews participation in the culture—he owns no technology, is self-reliant, and could not be more off the grid. The comic tone allows for the apotheosis of a person like Liver, so au- thentically devoted to his values that he wears clothing made of skin, perhaps human, possibly his own. It can feel wonderfully bad to cheer for an outlaw who is nevertheless on the side of right, and who might embody some of our own fantasies about disconnection.

The novel operates with two converging story lines. Complementing Hazel’s story is Jasper, a seasoned con artist and mild sociopath. He too fakes feelings to manipulate people and earn his living. He romances women in order to steal their money. The one difference from Hazel: He enjoys sex with his marks, and he never fakes pleasure. His knowledge of this ability, as he refers to it, shows a basic self-love, something else Hazel lacks: “He had a talent for getting turned on. This was the gift he’d been given in life. And it was silly for people not to make a living off what came easiest to them.” After one successful con, Jasper undergoes an absurd life-changing transformation during a vividly described underwater scene in which a dolphin attempts to mate with him. Jasper subdues the dolphin and finds he can now be turned on only by fantasies of dolphin sex. He’s been degraded, made absurd, trapped by an urge he finds impossible to fight. His livelihood is ruined, but his new situation evokes wonder for other reasons. Nut- ting puts us in the very strange position of appreciating Jasper’s new and utterly earnest dolphin love: Yes, he lusts after dolphins, but he falls in love with one dolphin in particular and wants to save her from captivity—and have blissful sex with her, too.

Hazel’s version of manipulation raises the question of authenticity in a more mundane way: To what degree do we fake and falsify at home, at work, in our relationships, in order to reap the rewards of conven- tionality? To what extent does participation in a socially acceptable life demand pretense? In its last chapter, the book offers a glimpse of what a genuine relationship might look like. Here, Hazel suggests a version of humanity so awkward as to be incapable of inauthentic gestures. Her flirting strips away more than romance; I have never read a more sorrowful and soul-shrinking seduction scene.

The two main characters’ situations, taken together, invite a reader to consider conventional romance as a socially acceptable con in which we willingly participate until it no longer amuses us. Hazel’s waitressing paints a picture of sexual self-exploitation for tips. Both Jasper and Hazel become enslaved by their artifice, and Nutting evokes sympathy for characters whom we would not expect to understand.

The technology in the book represents soul-shriveling violations of privacy and identity: a helmet that denies the possibility of a peaceful death in sleep, and an algorithm used to create a graduation speech delivered by a dead valedictorian, to name just two. The tech feels plau- sible and is objectively impressive, and one device—the most important to the story—operates on the narrative itself.

I feel obligated to report that I listened to some of the audio version as performed by Suzanne Elise Freeman, which brought out the delight- ful Elmore Leonard–like dialogue and heightened the humor. In this postcoital exchange, Hazel questions Liver about his “museum of scars”:

Hazel pointed to his torso. “Did you have an invasive surgery?” [ . . . ] “I guess you could say that.” [ . . . ]

“What else could you say?”

Liver shrugged. “Beware of motherfuckers.”

Liver’s laconic understatement works to good effect elsewhere as well and is in perfect keeping with his mysterious persona.

Later, when Hazel’s boss bids her farewell, we sense how low Hazel has sunk: “I’ll miss your sulking face reminding me of all I have to be thankful for. I hope you win your soul back in a bet or something.” The woman’s unvarnished judgment continues to build the case against the sorrowful, absurd version of authenticity that Nutting presents here. One laughs while brushing away the tears.

Nutting’s description of physical humor works beautifully too. Ha- zel’s primary form of locomotion throughout the novel, after walking, is crawling, and it’s amazing how many situations Nutting success- fully devises in which it seems truly necessary for Hazel to crawl. And the effect is different each time. One comic scene relying on physical humor works less well, but I’m holding it to the highest standard: Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, the scene in which Jim improbably destroys the bedsheets while trying to save them. While I could easily picture the action of Jasper’s goofy and earnestly executed dolphin burglary, it felt somewhat stock within the heist genre, whereas Hazel’s crawling episodes felt fresh in each iteration.

Nutting’s ingenious character depictions and predicaments raise enticing (and topical) questions: How fake are we? What does authenticity look like? How valuable is privacy, and is it possible to have too much? What is success? How do we value ourselves? Are we stuck being who we are, and can technology make us better? The questions keep unspooling, the mark of a worthwhile read.

Read more from Issue 15.1.