FICTION
Johanna
Thomas-Corr
Ghost Lover by Lisa Taddeo
Bloomsbury £16.99 pp240
Lisa Taddeo made her name
as a faithful and fearless guide
to what women are really
thinking. Her non-fiction
bestseller Three Women (2019)
traced the sexual lives of
ordinary American women
with care and candour. Along
with Kristen Roupenian, the
author of the much-shared
story Cat Person, Taddeo
became identified with a
post-#MeToo wave of writers
who challenged readers’
preconceptions about female
sexuality. And much like
Roupenian, viral success
has emboldened her to
abandon everything patient
and methodical in her
investigation of women’s
darker appetites in favour
of the literary equivalent
of chasing clicks.
Ghost Lover is a nine-course
tasting menu that is all spice
and no flavour. It picks up on
the sex-and-trauma scenarios
from Taddeo’s debut novel,
Animal (2021), a blood-soaked
revenge thriller set in Los
Angeles. On this menu are
stories of rape, paedophilia,
like a fish that tried to panfry
itself.” Ouch? Clearly Joan loves
a challenge: “She wanted his
balls inside her.”
Throughout, Taddeo rams
words together in unexpected
ways. “His voice turned
throaty, filled with wetness
and trees.” Trees? “He looked
dreamy and broad, and cozy
like pizzerias in October.”
Taddeo has very specific ideas
about the seasons. In one: “It
was early fall, the temperature
of ham sandwiches.”
I began to suspect a case
of the Nabokovs, my worst
fears confirmed by several
laconic death descriptions
(“father, pistol, end”; “heroin,
Miami”) that are ripped
off from the Russian
author “(picnic, lightning)”.
Perhaps Taddeo has read
Lolita and feels excited about
experimenting with theEnglish language. Only it
feels more as if she has done
the experimenting in another
tongue, Finnish or Swahili,
perhaps, then run a series of
untranslatable local sayings
through Google Translate. In
Beautiful People the heroine
owns a painting that we learn
“had come to her the way
those things occasionally do.
From rich men with bathwater
scrotums.” I found myself
reading this sentence four or
five times even though I didn’t
want to read it once.
Yet Taddeo is not about
to let the laws of biology get
in the way of a startling image.
One man has “eyes that
can actually finger you”.
Elsewhere: “She felt like
she had eighteen clitorises,
and all of them couldn’t
drive.” (A clitoris that could
drive might be worth noting.)
In the course of producing
this Goop noir, Taddeo has
abandoned any interest in
women as complex, conflicted
humans. Her characters are
myopically focused on
blow-dries, blow jobs and brow
tints. And from the traumatised
adolescent to the 50-year-old
woman catfishing for male
attention, they all speak in
a similar juvenile voice.
For all its hilarious
incoherence, Ghost Lover
ultimately inspires depression.
When will publishers stop
throwing money at women just
because they are writing about
sex? If a male author imagined
pan-frying his penis, there’s no
way he would be acclaimed as
a fearless chronicler of desire.
Ghost Lover doesn’t feel like
progress. As one woman in
Taddeo’s final story tells
another: “You’re full of
poisonous energy. I’m going
to need to do a juice cleanse
when I get home.” ctrauma, Ambien, the Beverly
Hills Hotel.
At least the proper nouns
denote actual things. When
Taddeo attempts metaphor,
we run into more serious
trouble. Take Joan, a 42-year-
old “cougar” who gets off on
self-loathing: “The more a man
didn’t want her, the more it
made her vagina tingle. It wassuicide, parental death, bodily
mayhem and more vengeance:
“I want to raise a daughter
with blades on her tongue who
will give blow jobs to all the
guys that hurt me,” one
character announces.
Yet the main dish is always
the same facile serving of
female jealousy. In every
effortfully flippant tale,
self-conscious women
compete to be the most
desirable female in the room.
“The smell of blood was in the
air, a slutty rivalry radiating
between the girls,” Taddeo
writes in one story. In another,
a woman complains: “You can
be twenty-six and it doesn’t
matter. There’s someone out
there who’s gonna be eighteen,
with a smaller vagina.”
Many of the stories are set
among a bitchy Hollywood
elite who confine themselves
to 170-calorie meals and lovers
with 10,000+ Twitter followers.
The title piece is a warped tale
of a reality TV star who,
rejected by her ex, harnesses
the power of #MeToo rage to
falsely accuse him of rape. By
way of scene-setting, Taddeo
scatters about brand names
and buzzwords, a little as if
Bret Easton Ellis had got hold
of the lifestyle site Goop:
Netflix, Nobu, side boob,
iced matcha latte, rape,
cupcakes, Malibu beach
house, swimming pool,FICTION
Patricia Nicol
Nightcrawling
by Leila Mottley
Bloomsbury £18.99 pp269
The 19-year-old poet Leila
Mottley’s striking debut novel
is set in — and dedicated to —
her home town of Oakland,
California. She began writing
Chasing clicks Lisa Taddeo’s
stories purport to explore
female sexualityNineteen years old and already a novelist to note
Blow-dries
and blow jobs
When will publishers stop throwing
money at women just to write about sex?
it at 17, the same age as her
first-person protagonist, Kiara.
The San Francisco Bay
Area city of Oakland is just
15 minutes’ drive from
Berkeley, and less than an
hour from Silicon Valley, but
these are worlds away from
Kiara’s financially precarious
day-to-day. Her mother is in
a halfway house, her father is
dead and her beloved brother
is a deadbeat. Her crack-
addict neighbour’s cute kid,Trevor, turns to her when his
mother goes Awol. For Kiara,
a high-school drop-out, each
new day dawns to the fresh
challenge of finding food and
evading eviction. She and her
friend regularly crash funerals
for a meal. “It’s all degrees of
being alive out here.”
Mottley’s socially incendiary
tale of the city is partially
inspired by an Oakland police
abuse scandal involving
allegations of the sexualexploitation of an under-aged
girl. This procedural plot
provides narrative pull and
a grim moral urgency. The
captivating, distinctively
voiced Kiara is a young black
American who can shoot
hoops and skateboard, but
her literary antecedents are
Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, Victor
Hugo’s Fantine and Elizabeth
Gaskell’s Ruth.
There are occasions when
Mottley’s fluid, instinctivewriting soars too high and
becomes overwrought, or
when her story veers a little
close to melodrama. Yet
mostly this feels like a
remarkable debut, one that
holds an illuminating if
unflattering mirror to
modern America.
It is exciting to wonder
what might lie ahead for
this writer, who turns 20
the same week she becomes
a published novelist. cIt’s as if she’s
experimented
in another
language
LARA DOWNIEBOOKS
34 29 May 2022