Alissa Nutting’s Tampa:
The New Metrics of a Junior High Lesson Plan
(published in The Buffalo News, Sept 1, 2013)
The school year is just about to kick off
and no other book this season will create the same hunger for long summer days filled
with incorruptible light than Alissa Nutting’s debut novel, Tampa. Showcased on tabloid “news”
program, Inside Edition, dubbed by Cosmopolitan Magazine the “most controversial
book of the summer,” while, at the same time, garnering high-end discussions at
pivotal arts and literary magazines like Bomb,
The Believer, and Tin House (to
name just a few), Nutting’s novel has effortlessly connected with a diverse cultural
milieu who are, normally, as eager to keep to their corners as teenage cliques
at a sock hop. Tampa has stirred readers
up. Not bad work for a new novelist.
It’s too simple to say that Tampa—now a finalist for the Center for
Fiction’s 2013 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize (the 2012 winner, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain, subsequently also won
the National Book Critics Circle Award)—is a novel about pedophilia. Tampa’s narrator, Celeste Price—a 26-year-old English
teacher with Barbie-styled good looks—is, undeniably, a remorseless sociopath with
a penchant for 14-year-old boys. But the novel is as much about consumerism,
the culture of beauty, and entrenched social perceptions about gender and
sexuality that allow Price to exploit the students in her junior high classroom.
Written in unflinching, single-minded prose, a smart aleck’s wink embeds each
line with more than a touch of irony: Price is a lousy teacher of literature
(whose lessons on Romeo and Juliet
and The Scarlet Letter she naturally twists
to promote her own agenda of desire and deceit), but she is without a doubt an
impresario of small-minded attitudes. Lovely Celeste knows that she’ll always get
the benefit of the doubt because she is desired, consciously and unconsciously,
by everyone around her: her colleagues and her neighbors, her students and
their parents alike. She’s the “sexy teacher.” The co-worker’s “hot wife.” The
pretty “neighbor next door.” Tampa’s foil
characters prefer to let Celeste fill roles in their fantasy lives, instead of
seeing her for who she really is.
The foreseeable result? Mayhem ensues. But
Celeste is a criminal with a mean girl’s chirpy cynicism. And there’s plenty of
slapstick, not to mention dark humor, to go around and keep the more unnerving
elements of the book afloat. It’s this dangerous character composite that makes
Tampa both troubling and hard to put
down.
As the novel begins, Celeste Price has
just secured her first teaching gig in Tampa, Florida. Married to a hunky cop
from an affluent family, Celeste’s life seems as ideal to outsiders as the
plastic figures of a wedding cake topper. But from the very first line of Tampa, Nutting’s narrator reveals that
her enthusiasm for the new school year has little to do with her lesson plans, or
her students’ excitement for their new backpacks and fall catalog fashions: Celeste
Price is already fixated on teaching her male students more than just the
nuances of metaphor. Dodging burnt out
teachers, post-adolescent jocks, and helicopter parents with meticulous care, Celeste
is remorseless as she puts her crimes in motion. For her, the question is never “why” or “if”
she’ll seduce one of her students….but when and how.
The fact that Celeste Price observes an
education system in disarray as she pursues her first conquest (a young
introvert named Jack), as well as reflects on the nuances of a consumerist
culture that idealizes beauty and wealth in the face of society’s most pressing
concerns, lends the novel an astute edge. What is it about the orderliness of a
landscaped yard or well-groomed clothes—the social mores that form expectations
of class—that prevent us from looking deeper at the people we encounter? It’s
of no surprise that Celeste drives a red Corvette. It’s a carefully chosen element
of her disguise.
Alissa Nutting’s interest in her
protagonist is as personal as it is literary.
As she reflects in multiple interviews, she went to high school with
Debra LeFave, the blonde, blue-eyed Florida middle school teacher who pled
guilty in 2004 to sleeping with her 14-year-old student. In a twist of judicial
infamy that captured the nation at the time, LeFave avoided prison time
because, as her lawyer argued, she was much “too attractive” for jail. (Late in
Tampa, Celeste Price similarly reflects
that she’s “too pretty for prison.”) Instead, as part of a plea deal, LeFave was
assigned 3 years of house arrest and 7 years of probation. Nutting’s narrator is also able to work the
legal system to her benefit in a conclusion to the novel that in no way ends
her predatorial story.
Tampa has already drawn plenty of comparisons
to Vladimir Nabokov’s famous novel Lolita,
which portrays middle-aged literature professor Humbert Humbert, who, under the
spell of a “nymphet’s” budding eroticism—as he famously tries to convince the
reader—is led to commit increasingly desolate acts. But Nutting’s book, while
recycling, (if shifting the gender of) Nabokov’s protagonist, along with its
similarly dark humor, offers the reader a satire of an unusually eroticized
nature. Nabokov’s lyricism skillfully clothes Humbert Humbert’s actions so that
sexual violation imperceptibly slips into scenes as idealized, baroquely worded
sagas (as he reflects, “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose
style”). By contrast, Nutting’s high-octane prose peels back each sex act with
the directness of an escort in drill sergeant’s garb, presenting the record of Celeste
Price’s depravity in prose reminiscent of passages in a top-shelf magazine. Lines
like “I just wallpapered my
cervix with the name of a teenage boy” pepper the novel’s pages. Yes, Celeste
Price is a monster. Dare we look away?
There are bound to be readers who wonder
if the eroticization is necessary. (There are also bound to be readers who
wonder if fictions about pedophiles should be written at all.) And, without a
doubt, Tampa is troubling, because
the novel asks contemplative readers to wonder about the limits of sexuality
and violence, and the capacity of our culture to misconstrue one for the other,
particularly when women are involved. (As Nutting reflects: “We’d
rather have our nation’s women be beautiful pedophiles than be dowdy
humanitarians with cankles.”) At the same time, it would be unwise to ignore
the fact that her novel has
been embraced by media forums that regularly depend on stories of sex and
violence for this misapprehension (and their sales) to continue. That Nutting
seems to be putting this intersection of forces directly in the cross-hairs of
the book—it’s arguably the origin of much of the black humor in the novel—is
one of the many reasons the novel is worth checking out.
Given the range of books to which Tampa has been compared so far—Nabokov’s
Lolita, Ellis’ American Psycho, Perrotta’s Little
Children, Banks’ Lost Memory of Skin,
and Baker’s Vox have all been
mentioned in passing—a connection to A.M. Homes’ novel The End of Alice is a downright surprising omission given that Homes (the recent 2013
winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction) paved the way for transgressive texts
about gender by women. In particular, her novel The End of Alice (1996) takes up a narrative about two predatorial
protagonists: a jailed male pedophile and his female pen pal whose letters
recount her ongoing pursuit of a young neighbor. As Homes reflects, “What
I'm doing, which sometimes makes people uncomfortable, is saying the things we
don't want to say out loud.” Put another way: she’s writing dangerous, discomfiting
stories, the kind that remind readers that fiction’s role isn’t just
entertainment; it’s presenting the truth, whether it’s welcome or not,
regardless of whether it arises in socially acceptable language. There’s a
tradition of women who look into our darkest places with an unerring eye and a
satirist’s ear.
Nutting—whose
first book, Unclean Jobs for Women and
Girls was published by Buffalo press, Starcherone Books—may very well be
taking this transgressive tradition to a new place.
