Exquisitely disorienting ... The book is driven by a kind of respiratory imagining, a panting projection that sustains both Mae and the story. She subjects her world and the people who populate it to a ravenous metamorphosing ... Some might find the plot’s relentless dissociation a decelerator, but I found it brave and effective: Flattery remains so loyal to the physics of her character’s struggles, to the struggle of storytelling itself, that she is willing to risk allowing the less committed reader to wander off.
The point of this novel is not illumination; it’s almost an accident that we get to know Mae at all. Instead the novel captures, in gorgeous prose, the happy and unhappy coincidences that allow us to fall into knowing, those unexpected snags that trip us into ourselves ... A revelation that is also distinctly anti-revelation, by a writer whose withholding is as vivid as her bestowing, who shows a story for what it is — something real, something fabricated, something to hide in and from, something special, something so utterly unremarkable it’s the only thing that matters.
This description, I’m aware, might call to mind a certain mode of historical fiction that feels awkwardly stuck between narrative art and Wikipedia—the kind of novel where you feel the author’s presence as a tour guide, always nervously looking over their shoulder, dropping more period detail and context to make sure you’re learning what you’ve come to learn. Nothing Special is nothing like that ... Flattery manages to cannily anatomize the famous artist’s powers and appeal while simultaneously pushing the man himself almost entirely out of the frame. It’s a method that the book uses more than once—sneaking up on its subjects from odd angles, as if distrustful of more direct paths ... In Flattery’s first book, the prose sometimes seemed so intent on preëmptively repelling false hopes or unearned optimism that it functioned not just as armor but also as a straitjacket, limiting the registers of feeling the stories we’re able to access. Nothing Special is a richer, more flexible undertaking ... Just as Nothing Special is a great book about Warhol with almost no Andy Warhol in it, so too is it a sneakily moving homage to human kindness, where kindness appears only in quick flashes and never solves anything. The possibility of real connection feels almost hidden, as if Flattery herself were afraid of making too much of it.
The reader starts to become conscious of the strangely generic quality of the world that Mae’s narration evokes ... The retrospective view might give Flattery a certain cover for her curiously generic settings, just as it might release her from some of the traditional obligations of historical fiction ... Almost every paragraph swerves unforgivingly into its own punch line, as in some relentless stand-up comedy routine ... The prose of Nothing Special is less spiky and more traditionally expository than that of the short stories. The nervous virtuosity of the stories has been tamed; the mood is memoiristic. There are gorgeous touches.
Flattery takes an inspired approach to showing how the stuff of our daily existence can, when mediated through technology, be made into a fiction ... Visceral.
Gets a bit heavy-handed ... Mae’s central drama is the incessant questioning of any girl: How should I be? How should I look? What is everyone else doing? ... It is here that Flattery is at her most interesting, demonstrating that the creative genius of Warhol overlaps with the regular dramas of girlhood ... Gives us a lens through which we see girlhood as a narrative of process, of artistic choice ... In this way, Mae’s story is just like a Warhol print — the same process, repeated over and over, giving mostly the same result in the end. She’s still just a girl. It’s a work of art to grow up, and some people never do.
Flattery joins a line of writers who satirize the prescription of work as a cure for the social ills of alienation, depression and hopelessness ... There is an element of tragedy ... Flattery refuses the image of the secretary as a mindless pink-collar bureaucrat.
Flattery’s title is explicit in its modesty—which is a strength and a weakness. Mae’s struggles and vulnerabilities are sharply observed—funny and cringy, tender and admirably economic, unfolding over the course of just 220 pages or so. But this also means that little of a very rich and colorful setting—late 1960s New York—is recorded here.
Ms. Flattery is Irish and has a keener sense than most American writers of class resentment, and the acrid, if somewhat sluggish, beginning of the book captures the sour fug of Mae’s loathing and loneliness, and her reckless search for something transformational ... Mae’s inevitable disillusion creates a bind for Ms. Flattery, who needs readers to share some belief in the romance of Warholia but makes a point to never conjure it ... Fine, closely observed scenes of the two on the town display an insight into loyalty and kindness that would have been alien to Warhol but briefly infuse this talented novel with something like beauty.
In fitting her complex, heartfelt, vexing characters into the spaces left where the names of Warhol’s typists should have been, Flattery is finally giving those egos, or a version of them, a chance to tell their own story, in their own words.
The tone – numb, ironic, smarter than thou – is, we understand, partly an act ... 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.
Sharply rendered ... There is little of the freewheeling playfulness that animated Flattery’s impressive 2019 short story collection, Show Them a Good Time. This is a more earnest – and commensurately less fun – work, but there are flashes, here and there, of the droll bathos that is the most charming feature of Flattery’s fiction ... This wry, deadpan style sits uneasily within the brooding psychodrama of the overarching storyline – it’s hard to inhabit both modes simultaneously – and the novel’s narrative texture is consequently a little uneven ... The experience of anticlimax is the essence of her moral journey
Wildly original ... Maddeningly engrossing. The narrative voice Flattery concocts for Mae is spiky yet alluring, in places reminiscent of Mary Gaitskill ... Flattery’s prose is sharp and sophisticated – and the book as a whole is brilliantly confounding. It is surprising and unsettling, but always gripping. What Mae knows and what she imagines become entwined.
Flattery demonstrates here how she can shape on a larger scale and be incredibly inventive in the process. But her strange gift for pitiless characters doesn’t work so well when she must impose moral order on her story ... Flattery’s willingness to be ugly and merciless on the page is what makes her work so relentlessly engaging.
At once unrelenting...and endlessly absorbing – is less a feminist retelling and more a lens on what Mae eventually realizes is 'misery laid bare in the service of art' ... This is an honest book about pretenders and the gap between who we are, what we say and how we appear. There are times when the theme is spread on a little thick...but perhaps that’s the point. From the start Mae senses this distance in herself and others, yet she plays along with the charade. Because it’s irresistible, this modern and free-spirited scene.
Time’s movement and malleability are central to Nothing Special: Flattery shifts between days and decades, revealing how quickly everything goes even as time seems to move impossibly slow ... Flattery understands teenagers well ... Why, for that matter, set another novel in Warhol’s New York? ... It doesn’t help that Mae is disaffected and flat, if at times wryly funny. The voice befits her backwards gaze—when the novel opens, she is middle-aged—but it also reflects trends within the contemporary literary landscape. There is a rhythm to Flattery’s writing that is occasionally fascinating but also anesthetizing.
Nothing Special is an enjoyable novel, astute and at times propulsive, but it is not a special one. In fact, despite being set in a place and moment that transformed art history, it’s a contemporary story like many others ... Flattery’s interest in banality, which often is or seems universal, keeps her from diving into the particularities of Nothing Special’s context and setting.
Inspired ... Against this gloomy background, a self-possessed Mae tries to find her 15 minutes of fame. Flattery’s fresh take on familiar lore makes this something special indeed.
Bleakly funny ... Like the conversations the young women transcribe, the novel is a strangely compelling combination of the soporifically mundane and the bracingly odd. Not just for Warhol fans.
