Though the novel’s subject matter is controversial, Tampa is also impeccably written, full of smart cultural observations, and no small amount of wit. Tampa is far bigger than the buzz, and more significant than the catchwords that will inevitably be attached to it … This is a novel about sexual deviance, relentlessness, and desire. It is compelling and disturbing, much like Lolita. Wrongs are committed, and flagrantly, but Nutting commits to her premise without wavering and demands the reader do so, too.
Through Celeste's eyes, no one except her young targets, particularly the inexperienced and sensitive Jack Patrick, is quite human, nor does the world hold much beauty, except when she finds herself in the throes of her perversions. Her sociopathic view of the world is a flat, bleak rendering where people more closely resemble machines and where their feelings are inconvenient, if they are detected at all … Tampa is erotic fiction: With Celeste at the narrative helm, we are brought quickly and irretrievably into her singular, compulsive and insatiable mind-set. We watch through parted fingers as she uses her looks as a weapon to both mollify her targets and shield herself from punishment. In this sly and salacious work, Nutting forces us to take a long, unflinching look at a deeply disturbed mind, and more significantly, at society's often troubling relationship with female beauty.
Tampa seems to belong to the literary-fiction-infused-with-sex, Rothian genre—a novel with titillating interludes but also a core idea: how much less disturbing we find relationships between grown women and young boys than those between men and underage girls...but Tampa’s challenge to that the double standard is not especially potent. Because its sexual content is both highly graphic and purposefully off-putting, it occupies uneasy, unresolved territory between erotica and satire … Unmitigated monstrosity is not the most incisive means of approaching the subject of female pedophilia. By making Celeste essentially inhuman, a satirical cartoon of a predator, Nutting avoids the tangled issues of power that lie beneath cultural norms for gender and sex. If Celeste were complicated beyond her fixation, the novel would be more erotic, more transgressive, and sharper in its commentary.
How readers respond to this novel will largely depend on how they feel about reading blow-by-blows about sex between a 26-year-old middle-school teacher and the 14-year-old boys she craves … Celeste remains mostly a ‘soulless pervert’ whom we listen to ‘with a curious revulsion, the same way one might watch a cow give birth.’ She remains largely unreflective about the roots of her fixation on boys. Jack isn’t a particularly well-delineated or interesting character, and the setting, despite presumably being Tampa, is so generic that the novel might as well be called ‘Akron’ …. For the most part, Nutting doesn’t [get the tone right]. That’s a shame, because she’s capable of knockout writing.
Tampa arrives flanked by quotations that liken it to Lolita, an inevitable comparison that doesn't do it any favours. Tampa resembles Lolita superficially at best: both are about compulsive paedophiles, but the similarity ends there … Nutting's writing is clean and controlled, its banality surely deliberate – an echo of the psychopath's lack of affect that Bret Easton Ellis used so cleverly in American Psycho. But Nutting offers nothing to supplement the arid vacuum of obsessive lust in which Celeste is trapped … Celeste's infinite superficiality and terror of ageing certainly embody some key anxieties of millennial America, but the parallels stop there, and the reader is left entrapped in this barren psychic landscape, with little to watch but a teacher who masturbates on her classroom desk.
It is indeed explicit, but it is a work of serious ambition, both literary and moral. It's also laced with dark, sometimes savage humor and juicy riffs on consumer culture and its twin obsessions, youth and beauty … Celeste, a cold, calculating beauty, has organized her life for one purpose, and one only: the seduction of adolescent boys. She loathes everyone else, particularly her husband, whom she married for cover and for the luxury afforded by his family wealth.
Beginning with an opening set piece of classroom masturbation of gymnastic proportions, the novel’s perpetual focus is Celeste’s rapacious hunger … Tampa’s graphic sex scenes expertly skirt their status as “molestation episodes.” Presumably, this is because we are bound to Celeste’s point of view and she herself does not traffic in such concerns … What is the taboo?...it does not seem to be a queasiness over female sexual explicitness. Or even bald female sexual hunger. Instead, it’s female sexual compulsion that seems to so unnerve readers. Celeste’s every act is ruled by her sexual drive, for which she feels no shame or guilt, only a desire to repeat it. Nothing can stop her and she has no desire to stop herself. At heart, compulsive behavior among women feels more troubling, more alien.
Some may be offended by the sexually vivid prose. This reader worried more about boredom. But despite a disappointing climax (sorry), the writing is often excellent, hilariously dark, and mean … Celeste is horrible. Reading about her was honestly disturbing and fun.
I had a hard time stomaching Celeste Price...It's not that Celeste is a self-absorbed, colossally vain, amoral, sociopathic sexual predator of children, though she is. It's that I got bored with her … Celeste seems to have no past nor any interest in anything besides herself and her appetites. And she couldn't care less what the reader or anyone else thinks of her. One of her chief character traits is utter disdain for everyone except, very temporarily, her victims … Tampa has one focus: shocking sex — and it's not easy to be shocking these days. It doesn't bother with much of anything else, like setting, plot or character development (unless you count Celeste getting even meaner).
Nutting unleashes a devious temptress whose acts of deception are as all-consuming as her incessant masturbatory frenzy …For decades, transgressive fiction has traditionally been grim, male and graphic. For those few voices asking why there aren’t more women working in this swamp, this one’s for you … A taxing attempt to penetrate the mind of female child molesters with grimy, mundane results.
