Someone should write a thesis on the titles that young women from Ireland are giving their novels. Normal People. Exciting Times. Nothing Special. “My characters inhabit coffee shops, they take long, pointless walks, they conduct themselves without aim or ambition,” Nicole Flattery once said, underselling her debut collection, Show Them a Good Time, about protagonists not entirely unlike herself – a reader trap common among Flattery’s cohort – navigating millennial work and womanhood in surreal tales lit up by off-kilter phrase-making.
Yet at a time when plausibly autofictional debuts often give way to plausibly autofictional follow-ups, there was no little intrigue in the announcement that Flattery was at work on a novel about Andy Warhol and his Factory studio. What, you wondered, brought her to that already much-mythologised subject? And what could she possibly bring to it? In fact, the resulting novel, far from a curveball, makes perfect sense: a wry coming-of-age tale told by a lonely teenage girl in Warhol’s orbit, Nothing Special could be an elaboration of one of Flattery’s short stories, which frequently turn on a thirst for experience and the aftertaste of the charade required to achieve it.
It centres on the making of Warhol’s a, A Novel (1968), an experimental slice-of-life breeze block built from taped conversations typed up by two schoolgirls, one of whom Flattery imagines as our narrator, Mae. We join her in 2010, deep in middle age, before we cut quickly back to 1966, when she’s 17, riding escalators with an eye out for male attention, having been cold-shouldered at school and left alone by her mother, a waitress with a drink problem and an on-off boyfriend whose household presence seldom seems healthy.
The tone – numb, ironic, smarter than thou – is, we understand, partly an act, as befits a teenager who steals her mother’s bra to meet an older man or shoplifts a shirt for a job interview. When a doctor somewhat creepily points her towards a “friend [who] has an art studio, an expanding business, over on East 72nd Street, and always needs girls to go and do errands for him”, it accelerates her desire for independence, not least because of the sexual content of the tapes she starts transcribing, to say nothing of the parties. More poignantly instructive is the precarious friendship she forms with another girl typist, likewise in flight from her upbringing.
If there’s a surprise, it lies in the boldly interior quality of Flattery’s storytelling, in which psychological and emotional experience unspools as if for an unseen interlocutor. A mention of “Susan” (the actor Susan Bottomly, AKA International Velvet) goes unglossed and Warhol himself barely appears, not even by name; when, early on, Mae notices something “he would find amusing”, it’s down to us to know who she’s talking about.
While the method – Warhol as Wolf Hall – denies reader-friendly hand-holding (the jacket praise “demands repeated reading” could be taken two ways), it avoids the hamminess that bedevils fiction about celebrities. Ultimately, the thrilling sense of Flattery’s aesthetic and intellectual stringency is what comes to define her seemingly low-key enterprise here. You could almost imagine someone reading Nothing Special and not even noticing Warhol at its heart, which may be the point of a novel that pictures the lives of his unseen instruments.
• Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
