NOTHING SPECIAL

Nicole Flattery

(Bloomsbury, £16.99)

 

In the early days of Andy Warhol’s studio, The Factory, on New York’s East 47th Street, the amphetamine-addicted actor Ondine (real name Robert Olivo) was one of the leading lights of the artist’s stable of “superstars”. In 1965, and focusing principally on Ondine, Warhol began tape-recording his entourage’s conversations, which were then transcribed by four young female typists – including Velvet Underground drummer Maureen Tucker – and published three years later under the title a, A Novel.

The scenario intrigued Galway-based author Nicole Flattery, inspiring her to create Mae, a 17-year-old girl desperate to escape her alcoholic waitress mother, and Mom’s devoted but unappreciated boyfriend, and reinvent herself as someone special. Shunned as a weirdo at high school, Mae drops out and takes instead to wandering around uptown, riding Macy’s escalator for hours and indulging her curiosity about sex.

A sleazy doctor suggests she apply for a job at his friend’s art studio, which turns out to be The Factory. Once there, she is seated in front of a typewriter alongside recent recruit Shelley, who is also running away from a stifling home life, and given tapes to transcribe. Countless teenagers would sell their souls to be at the hub of scene as cool as this one – but Mae and Shelley are just typists, shut in a room by themselves and ignored by Warhol and his crew.

Even so, they start to feel special, empowered. The tapes are “the most startling thing that’s ever happened to me,” Mae says, and her first viewing of a Warhol film is a life-changing event. “The day-to-day places of ordinary people in their suits and good dresses now seemed gutless, mediocre.” Shelley agrees, saying, “I have this charm here that I didn’t have at home.”

This may be the era of Flower Power, but the mood in Warhol’s court is darker, the attitude tougher, the drugs heavier, the exploitation more overt. Warhol attracts damaged people, and as Mae hears them deteriorate over successive tapes she finds her mind filled with thoughts of humiliation and cruelty and a desire for degrading experiences. “Maybe I’d been listening to Ondine for too long,” she thinks. “Maybe I’d replaced my personality with his.”

Mae is not especially likeable. Driven out into the world by the sundering of a school friendship, and convinced that “there was something lethal attached to female attention and jealousy”, she’s petty, cynical, quick to take offence and slow to forgive. But it’s hard not to sympathise with her after she’s traded in one unhealthy environment for another, her quest for independence leaving her dislocated and lost. In her shaky friendship with Shelley, who impresses her by refusing to hide her prim rural origins in this temple of urban cool, Mae hopes to find a kindred spirit, but is met instead with an imperfect reflection that reminds her of the life she can never go back to.

The Warhol circus is the ideal setting to explore this numb, jaded teenager’s complex interior life – and, as a narrator, she filters the thoughts of her younger self through a lifetime’s experience, sandwiching her formative New York period between chapters set in middle age, dealing with the impending death of her mother and reflecting on how her life has unfolded.

Although some disappointed readers, perhaps expecting to see more of Warhol himself, are already complaining that this novel is far from what was promised by the blurb, it’s a startlingly good dissection of a spiky, perceptive teenager cast adrift in a world of transactional relationships. Intentionally or not, Nothing Special was an ironic title to give it.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT