Perdita Jungfrau thought she was going to be married to her husband forever, so falling in love with Nando, her neighbor’s anarcho-Marxist roofer, is a crisis. Life seems to put every possible obstacle in their way: she’s pregnant, he has a girlfriend, he’s fifteen years younger, she’s terrified of messing up her children and equally drawn towards this magnetic man who entrusts her with his deepest secret. Now it’s three years later and Nando has been murdered.
A Little Bit Bad, the debut novel by Cassandra Neyenesch, starts with a man falling off a ladder. Reading this gleefully disorienting story, you’ll know how he feels. Neyenesch’s book is a little bit of many things, none of them bad ... Reads like Miranda July’s All Fours crouching over a domestic thriller. Neyenesch has a similarly hilarious take on the way cooped-up desire can ferment into an intoxicating hooch ... This zany novel crackles with spontaneity and absurd wit.
Like All Fours, A Little Bit Bad has a careering plotline, flying between the everyday drudgery of mom-life, and a heightened, surreal or imagistic mode ... There were points at which I wondered whether Neyenesch was deliberately satirising All Fours, or more broadly the trend for frantic fictional celebrations of older women going rogue ... At heart, this story is tragic. The touch of satire pulls it back from the abyss, and it’s probably for the best. I absolutely enjoyed every single page. The plot is constructed for compulsive reading.
A Little Bit Bad has all the hallmarks of a witty thriller, but the split narrative timeline allows for more than mere mystery. The present of 2010 is intercut with flashbacks to Perdita’s on-off relationship with Nando ... But Nando deserted her, and now he is dead. As this delightfully plotted novel comes to a close, we learn who killed him and why. It is a surprise to us; less so to Perdita, who has known all along that almost anyone might be driven to be a little bit bad.
