Well, I dare say.
Perhaps it’s not the
best way to start this review, but there’s something about the book’s title
that is not quite right. It is beautifully concise and it does have some
titillating vagueness and I’m sure Alissa Nutting put much thought into it, but
all I could think of were travel guides and lots of various reasons for hating
that American town. Tampa. I remain
in two minds about it. Even despite the fact that yes indeed – both stories,
real and fictional, took place in that particular area in the state of Florida.
Lots of things have been
said about this book, but two ideas seemed especially eye-catching and
ubiquitous. One: it is the most scandalous/controversial novel of the summer.
Perhaps of the whole year. Two: it is a modern update of Lolita. Now I’m not going to argue with the first point – perhaps
it is and perhaps it isn’t. What’s controversial these days anyway? Though I
will concede that it will take one hell of a book to beat Tampa in that department. As for Lolita, I really don’t know how to put it without coming off as a
snob, so I’ll just say that Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert and Nutting’s Celeste
Price are both infatuated with a person younger than 15. Similarities end
there. Having said that, those who mention Tampa
in the same breath with 50 Shades Of Grey
are equally mad. Gratuitous sex, female author and popularity (a lot more
modest in this case) make for a rather shaky analogy.
The novel itself.
Interestingly for a book tackling paedophilia, it never felt like this was
Alissa Nutting’s subject matter. Rather, it read like a story of one particular
pervert: Celeste Price, a 26-year old schoolteacher who is erotically driven (I
don’t consider myself a prude, but Jesus Christ those details) to vulnerable
boys at the age of 14. Not the ones who want sex, but the ones who don’t know
or are too scared to show how much they want sex. Celeste has a husband and is
relatively well off. She is attractive to boys and men (even after all the sordid details, you would still want
her) and seems to be quite successful on her job. The problem is, the only
reason why she took up that job in the first place was the chance to meet that one boy she will fuck. To give you
an idea of who we are dealing with here, Celeste’s way of soothing a 14-year
old boy who’s suffering from a terrible shock is to fellate him. There’s no
question that pathology is extremely well conveyed here. As well as the
troubled, furtive mind of a sick woman.
There’s one particular
boy: Jack Patrick. Needless to say, most of the book is an eyeball-piercing
account of Celeste’s secret sex life (or not that secret; sometimes she has to do
it with her husband – basically, ‘shut up and stick it in’). Blowjobs,
handjobs, rim jobs, there’s very little that isn’t there. Which is not to say
that Tampa is not a well written
book. There’s an odd balance issue: the novel does seem tame when the raunchy
parts aren’t there and it comes off excessive when they are. Still, I’d argue
that there’s a lot of fine writing in there, with the similes rather effectively
ranging from somewhat romantic (the colour of Jack’s eyes is ‘virginal brown’) to
quirky but intriguing (sex is ‘seafood with the shortest imaginable shelf
life’) to inevitably gross (semen’s taste is described as ‘metallic salt’, no less).
It works. Besides, some scenes are truly powerful. There’s no denying the parts
where Jack tells Celeste about his love and wants to hear the same from her.
Something she absolutely can’t do. Can’t, shouldn’t, unable to. Or the way she
describes the effects she had on Jack’s physical development. Or that crazy
dream of hers where boys are dancing around her husband’s corpse. In other
words, Tampa is the sort of book that
will get stuck in your brain for a long long time.
If there’s a book I will
compare this to, it’s Zoe Heller’s Notes
On A Scandal. It is obvious that Heller’s book had much more finesse and
restraint about it – but then again, Tampa
deals with pathology. And shock element or not, it does the job well. Is it a
disturbing read? It is, by all means. Any sane person will encounter
enough wince and cringe inducing moments before reaching the novel's end.
However, what you might find particularly disturbing are not even sex scenes in
school rooms or toilets for the disabled, but the fact that some crimes seem
not just unpunished. They seem unpunishable.
7/10
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