Seventeen-year-old Mae is an excellent listener. In almost every other respect, the narrator of Nicole Flattery’s debut novel is a mess: she’s dropped out of school; she’s ignoring her mother; her nascent encounters with the adult world are bleak enough to give Holden Caulfield a run for his money. Chaos swirls around her, but she manages, somehow, to hold herself still at the centre of it: saying little, giving nothing away, but paying close attention. And it’s this capacity to listen – to receive rather than to transmit; to locate herself in the audience, rather than to launch herself on to the stage – that allows her to step into a role as a vital but invisible cog in what would become a world-famous machine.
Nothing Special is set in the grubby avant garde of Andy Warhol’s Factory studio, which, in 1966, when the story kicks off, was establishing itself as an artistic and cultural force to be reckoned with. On the face of it, Flattery’s choice of time and place is unexpected: she’s strongly associated with the new wave of Irish literature, while Warhol and his Factory are as American, in their way, as apple pie. But those who’ve read her acclaimed 2019 collection, Show Them a Good Time, will realise at once that while the physical landscape of Nothing Special – the diners and department stores and “people disappearing into subway stations” – is quintessentially New York, the emotional terrain is all Flattery’s own. Mae and her new friend, fellow Factory worker Shelley, are cut from precisely the same cloth as the jaded, affectless women who populated Flattery’s short stories: they’re perceptive about the limits placed on female experience, but too disillusioned to do anything other than accommodate them; they yearn for significance but can find no way of attaining it. Mae and Shelley are charged with answering the Factory’s famous silver telephone, but the callers never ask for them.
