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.
Neyenesch’s darkly funny debut splices a murder mystery with a torrid extramarital affair between a sleep-deprived new mother and her roofer ... The plot hinges on a very substantial twist, but the book’s real power lies less in the whodunit than in Perdita’s singular interiority and caustic humor. There’s much to admire in this off-kilter story of a woman’s midlife crisis.
