Life Has Always Been a Performance
Copies can be so much more appealing than their originals: Think of Andy Warhol’s silk-screened prints of Elizabeth Taylor and Mao Zedong and Jacqueline Kennedy, his hand-painted reproductions of Campbell’s soup cans. The title of Nothing Special, the Irish writer Nicole Flattery’s new novel, is itself a copy, derived, as Flattery has said, from an idea that Warhol once dreamed up for an unproduced talk show called The Nothing Special, which he envisioned to be about, well, nothing in particular.
One can imagine an editor coolly slicing off the the of the original title from Flattery’s manuscript, imbuing it with that kind of muted disaffection that has become something of a trend among recent books by young Irish women writers, such as Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times. Unlike those works, though, Flattery’s novel—her first, following her 2019 short-story collection, Show Them a Good Time—looks to the past, taking place in the New York City of the 1960s and, later, the early 2010s. We follow Mae, the working-class daughter of a waitress, first as a high schooler in 1967 and then as a middle-aged woman during the Internet-flush world of the new millennium, as she recalls the period she spent as a teenager transcribing a series of tape recordings made by Warhol at his Factory.
[Read: Sally Rooney addresses her critics]
As a conceit, it’s one rooted in fact. Warhol used the unedited transcriptions—mostly monologues given by his friends and compatriots—to create his 1968 amphetamine-fueled a: A Novel. In his 1980 memoir, Popism, he remembered “two little high school girls” in charge of the project, their names since lost to history. “I’d never been around typists before so I didn’t know how fast these little girls should be going,” he recalled. “But when I think back on it, I realize that they probably worked slow on purpose so that they could hang around the Factory more.” Much in the same way that conversations, recorded and then transcribed, can be transformed into a novel, social media helps us take the raw material of our life and shape it into a narrative for others’ consumption, whether through images, videos, or text. Flattery takes an inspired approach to showing how the stuff of our daily existence can, when mediated through technology, be made into a fiction. By writing of a pre-digital past that was so preoccupied with replicating and documenting itself, turning life into a performance, Flattery shows us that what’s changed isn’t human nature, just our technologies.
Always, there is Warhol, lurking on the sidelines, simultaneously an artist defined by his times and a weirdly modern media impresario. (In one scene, Mae watches one of Warhol’s famously long, plotless, ad-libbed films, an early precursor to reality television and vlogging.) “His head was permanently slightly to the side, as if he was always receiving information,” Mae observes halfway through the book, after she’s been drawn into the world of the Factory following a visit to a pill-pushing quack of a doctor who’s friendly with the mother of a boy she sleeps with. Warhol is rarely called by name; if he’s mentioned at all, it’s usually by his nickname, “Drella,” a combination of Dracula and Cinderella that gives the reader a pretty good sense of what his friends and followers thought of him. This is a wise decision on Flattery’s part: A fully realized depiction of Warhol, with all his distinctive and well-documented tics and affectations, would have dominated the book and opened Flattery up to dull criticisms about the veracity of her portrayal. Much better to keep Warhol off to the side, an eavesdropping phantom presence. “I was never even introduced to him,” Mae explains, “but I knew his soft voice, his quick, soundless steps.”
Like the teenage girls who fuel today’s social-media trends, Mae and her colleague, the awkward and mysterious Shelley (a wonderful detail: When riding the subway with Mae, “she always got off at different stops”), create a performance in their own right through the simple act of transcribing other people’s lives. “It felt like committing to a fiction,” Mae thinks of her hours spent typing in a corner of the Factory, as Warhol and members of his coterie walk past and watch them. “A performance I took part in every day. I always changed before I went inside and started typing … It was the only thing worth doing. It was going to transport me.” It is addictive, this performance: “I got everything I needed from the tapes … What kind of work would we find after this? It must have crossed Shelley’s mind too that when the last tape ended, so would our lives.” This is a line, frenetic in its relationship to the machine, that would not be out of place in a novel set in 2023, with people’s identities and daily lives so wrapped up in their phones.
[Read: The great novel of the internet was published in 1925]
When writing about the machinery itself, Flattery is visceral. There is the “constant metal-on-metal sound of the typewriters”; a camera is described as “still, like an animal getting ready to pounce.” Her descriptions recall the way we interact with our screens, the perpetual typing, texting, photographing, recording, uploading. Mae might have found a sense of purpose, but no one in her world—desperate as they all are for fame—is having much fun. Though she may think of herself as a writer, her mother’s boyfriend, Mikey, quickly deflates that notion with one on-the-nose line: “That doesn’t sound like writing, Mae. It’s eavesdropping. It’s surveillance.”
Today, the surveillance is ubiquitous—the quotidian swipe-through of Instagram Stories, the experience of filming and being filmed within a public place. That sense of performance that Flattery captures has leaked out of the silver walls, the speedy gallery parties, the jaded 1960s art world into our every day. When Mae’s experiences of the world become “machine-like, impersonal,” she flees the city for California, nature, and a clearer sense of reality. Now, though, escaping can be more difficult.
Early on in Nothing Special, Mae, middle-aged and having gone back East to care for her aging mother, starts sending emails containing “unasked for information,” mostly detailed memories of her mother, to strangers—young publishing assistants she imagines sitting at a keyboard as she once did before a typewriter: “I could only picture the recipient of my emails as a girl in her early twenties, no older. I imagined her with a neat desk, combed hair, more sophisticated than I was at that age … Nobody wanted to turn on the computer and read about a deranged person’s life. I was the minority then. Now, I’m the majority.” The image she conjures may ring true to many readers, a stark reminder of the fact that today, we’re all living a performance, in a modern-day Factory, whether we like it or not.