The enduring cult of personality that surrounds Andy Warhol has birthed countless documentaries, biographies, films, posthumous exhibitions and novels. Nicole Flattery’s debut novel, Nothing Special, offers a unique take on this cult. Despite the blurb placing a heavy emphasis on Warhol’s presence in the book, our protagonist Mae is a 17-year-old typist working at his infamous Factory, whose encounters with Warhol are fleeting and often restricted to her imagination.
Mae is a high school dropout, with an alcoholic waitress Mother and an absent Father. She finds comfort in going to the cinema with her mother’s live-in ex-boyfriend and riding up and down the escalators in Macy’s. She is a self-confessed ‘weirdo’. If this sounds suspiciously like the ‘pick me’ female character from a John Green novel, it’s because Flattery does occasionally stray into this territory. After witnessing a girl from school pass out during a dance recital, Mae tells her friend Maud, in secret, that ‘I found the fit exciting’, and then repeats this story continuously to anyone who will listen. It’s hard not to read everything she says in the affected voice of a petulant teenager. But this is Flattery’s aim. In Mae, we can’t help but recognise our own embarrassing teenage attempts to seem cooler than we were.
“In Nothing Special Flattery consistently deals with a world of overlapping contradiction between imagination and reality.”
When Mae is hired to transcribe Warhol’s audio tapes, which will eventually make up his book, a, A Novel, it seems she has had her uniqueness confirmed. But the tapes are all-consuming and are constantly on the verge of devouring Mae and her best friend and co-typist Shelley. Throughout the novel, the girls are engaged in an exhausting mental tug of war between wanting to believe that they are working on ‘a project of huge importance’ and the nagging realisation that they are ‘nothing special’ and that ‘there would be nothing of me or Shelley in (the book). It would be scrubbed clean.’ Here, Flattery’s authentic voice shines through, astutely capturing the heartbreaking power of self-deception: ‘I was high on how much I knew: every hour people confessed directly into my ears’…’There were days where I felt like God’.
In Nothing Special Flattery consistently deals with a world of overlapping contradiction between imagination and reality. She deftly captures the chasm between the glamorous exterior of Warhol’s artistic endeavours and its empty and depraved interior – ‘cold’, ‘tacky and peeling’. Her depiction of 60s New York also acts within this contrast, constantly flipping between a city brimming with possibility and a desolate consumerist hellhole.
At one point in the novel, Shelley snarks that ‘(Warhol’s) nothing really is he?….He’s just a pair of blue jeans’ and Mae adds that ‘He has a bad complexion’. In Nothing Special, Flattery reveals that it’s not Warhol or the tapes that are special, but instead, the complex, beautiful and painful female relationships that take shape in the background. In an environment torn between imagination and reality, Mae’s realisation that ‘(Shelley) treated me like I was real’ is truly a profound acknowledgement.
Words: Holly Gash
