The stories in Nicole Flattery’s exhilarating debut are populated with women who might be the same person at different times of their lives ... Lack of money and employment are frequent problems, as are her characters’ relationships with older men ... Like her contemporary, Sally Rooney, Flattery is drawn to the power imbalances between young women and older men ... Her depiction of such relationships is more nuanced than victims and exploiters...though nor does she let men off the hook. Flattery’s judgments crackle with cruel, clear sight ... The book’s epigraph comes from Lorrie Moore, who is an obvious influence on the high-wire style, those seductive insights armoured with glittering wit against the pain they describe. Flattery writes with empathy, freedom and virtuosic technique: this debut announces the arrival of a brilliant talent.
Flattery’s writing is like a fever dream; the details are lucid, but the basics (place, time) are disorientingly hazy. Perhaps this rootlessness is intentional ... Many of Flattery’s protagonists have endured some sort of trauma, but the events are so buried we feel we’re getting only their bitter remains, and we’re unsure if those remains are strength, or apathy ... The cruelty in the worlds Flattery draws makes the tender moments in her stories all the more affecting.
Flattery, whose stories have been compared to Lorrie Moore’s, depicts dead-end jobs and the grinding fear of poverty. While her style is jaunty and enlivening—Groucho Marx funny—her young women are even less hopeful than Moore’s. They’re held hostage by the economic machinery of their lives ... Beneath the one-liners and clever dark comedy, Show Me a Good Time shows real daring. 'Abortion, a Love Story' intentionally takes things too far, pushing way past 'plot' and 'character' to arrive at something that feels violently new. Flattery’s depiction of precarity is not ornamental. It stretches and blisters the form of the stories themselves, leaving the reader laughing, crying, confused—and feeling understood.
Nicole Flattery’s publisher paid big money for these debut stories (plus a novel-in-progress), and it’s not hard to see why: they’re often extremely funny – peculiar as well as ha-ha – and highly addictive ... Flattery’s themes are work, womanhood and early-to-midlife indirection, all tackled slantwise ... It’s easy to read but trickier to get a handle on: Flattery’s off-kilter voice blends chatty candour and hard-to-interpret allegory (think Diane Williams or 90s Lorrie Moore), with the deadpan drollery and casually disturbing revelations heightened by her fondness for cutting any obvious connective tissue between sentences ... Trauma lurks in the background, with allusions to attempted suicide, abuse and a 13-year-old’s miscarriage ... Yet Flattery’s stories don’t depend on bringing such things to light; they’re just there – part of a woman’s life – which ultimately proves more disconcerting ... Flattery...doesn’t seem too bothered about sewn-up narratives running from A to B; it’s a mark of her art in these strange, darkly funny stories that we aren’t either.
The eight stories in the collection have a snappy, wry humour to them. Think early Lorrie Moore, or here at home, the stories that launched Anne Enright’s career. Flattery has a similarly sharp sense of humour and justice, and a writing style that uses contrast to great effect ... Flattery’s ability to switch, sometimes in the same line, from sorrow to comedy gives the collection depth and momentum. There is an international scope to her writing that recalls contemporary American authors such as Laura van den Berg and Kristen Roupenian ... Flattery’s style...is bold and bracing and has no bones about it ... 'Track', which won the 2017 White Review Short Story Prize, is set in New York city as a young Irish woman charts her relationship highs and lows with a famous comedian. A startling tale of loneliness and degradation, it is also a bitingly funny account of talent on the wane. The opposite is true for the Mullingar author herself, whose debut collection heralds a rising star.
Like Gaitskill, Flattery’s dominant interest is in people who are deeply estranged not just from their surroundings – they are isolated even in crowded rooms, and the ones in relationships are the most isolated of all – but from themselves, too ... Flattery has said she writes about 'young women searching for meaning they might never find' ... Flattery knows how to mine these emotional states for humour (this is a very funny book) without diluting their pathos (it’s a very sad book, too). At its best, which is often, Flattery’s prose has a thrilling relentlessness and rhythmical snap to it; it pummels and excites ... Although they deal largely with disordered thought, disappointment, the failure to connect and pain, the arc of many of these stories is not as grim as you might think ... The sense remains, though, as in the stories and novels of Jean Rhys, that the mistakes we have witnessed are likely to be repeated.
What ails these women, and what might help them? Flattery’s scenarios are so frequently fractured and quasi-dystopic that it’s hard to make a diagnosis; you might as well attempt to impose logic on a particularly lurid and melodramatic dream. And yet, as with the insistently recurrent patterns of the dream world, there is a logic, one that the reader can gradually discern as the warped narratives bloom and settle. During that process, the author’s ear for a sharp one-liner and a snappy encapsulation is evident ... Some of these pieces reminded me a lot of Deborah Levy, and particularly her earlier stories: brutal, disorientating, filled with appetite, anger and characters who seem to spring from nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Their milieux are both provisional—an entropic world, halfway houses, temporary caravans—and intimately tied to political and social structures. It is a bold beginning, and one that you can only hope Flattery finds continuingly productive.
The world in which these stories unfold is strange, menacing, and surreal. Occasionally, it verges on fantastic ... Reading these stories, you’re never quite sure what to expect, what bargain characters have struck with reality. At times, the tales progress according to realist conventions; at other times, according to a dream logic in which characters’ reactions seem displaced or condensed, wildly disproportionate or slightly off-key ... The simple act of changing a lightbulb becomes the climax of the title story, in which many far more intense things have occurred. This surrealism permeates down to the sentence level, making each story delightfully surprising and unsettling to read ... In these ways, Flattery’s tales are reminiscent of Donald Barthelme’s short fiction or the stories of Leonora Carrington, in which meaning and desire attach to unexpected things. They are also, like the work of both those writers, extremely funny ... If the collection has a weakness, it’s that the stories all operate in a similar emotional register ... Nicole Flattery...has created a compelling and fascinating first collection, at once vivid and ominous, hilarious and able to walk, unflinching, into the dark.
After reading [the stories] once I couldn’t remember anything about them – the titles, the characters, structures, written in first or third person, what (if anything) happened in them, lines I liked, even what the book was called. Usually I find my least favourite aspects of a book not only memorable, but impossible to forget; these, too, I had no sense of ... It isn’t just the lack of plot or setting or proper names (though there isn’t much of any of this). The book is a bit like drinking: refreshingly obliterative, realistically distorted. The disaffected young woman has replaced the disaffected young man as semaphore for social problems, but while many recent authors – among them Ottessa Moshfegh, Halle Butler and Catherine Lacey – have attempted to evoke the depths of hopelessness plumbed in the last decade or two, Flattery’s nihilism is uniquely uncynical; she actually seems to believe that nothing matters ... Flattery makes it easy not to get caught up in the detail because these women don’t either: they’re too exhausted, or mad, or depressed ...The clipped quirkiness of her prose relieves the text of the burden of narrative, which to Flattery usually means tedious contrivance or self-serving sentimentality ... Each story – there are eight – is narrated as though its anti-protagonist is in a transitional phase of her life, post-traumatic and drifting, the sort of phase she might make light of by describing it as a time when she watched a lot of reality TV...
Anomalies abound, loose ends are seldom tied up, and clarity either comes late to the reader or not at all. It is up to us to adjust to the distorted perspective or simply go with Flattery’s flow ... puzzling revelations and descriptions ... Just when we think we know where Flattery is going she disorients us by changing tack and veering off-course into surreal territory. Again and again we encounter bizarre, head-scratching turns ... Some of Flattery’s conceits seem odd for the sake of it. The longest story here grinds wearyingly on and its protagonists outstay their welcome. But the best tales blend personal pain and mordant wit, and are seductively offbeat and pleasingly on point.
...just as we expect another stereotypical homage to age-old literary ritual, Flattery's narrator veers left-field into a confusing memory about starring in a lo-fi film with her abusive ex-boyfriend. The small interlude purposely eschews clarity. In fact, the reader is left more confused at the end of this humorous tale than they were at the beginning. This alluring collection continues in this uncompromising and fragmented manner. If tradition is the kitchen sink, Flattery removes it from the wall, smashes it to pieces, and dances all over it with delight: as existential darkness and infinite uncertainty constantly trade places with a cutting, dead-pan, laugh-out-loud black humour ... The language is self reflective and ironic, without coming off as snooty, cerebral, or pretentious. And where there is even the slightest sniff of a potential cliche in sight, the author immediately tears it down with scrupulous psychological analysis. With a literary voice that is as sophisticated and erudite as it is spiky and hilarious, Flattery has taken the short story format into an exciting, energetic, and multifaceted dimension: which seems to aptly reflect the narrative space we now call reality on a daily basis.
This book is not boring, not unimaginative, not without a dry humour or a sense of irony. It also does have an authorial voice—but Nicole Flattery’s narrative voice is monotonous, with almost no variation in tone, no cadences, no impetus. It is persistent without being insistent. It does not shock, nor engage the reader with its rhetoric. It will not raise readers above their own level of experience or excitement. The stories are heartfelt and poignant, but the heart needs a bypass and the poignancy needs a shot in the arm. The second serious issue is the lack of originality. This is not a new voice in Irish fiction but a familiar echo of world literature ... Whether or not Flattery has read Kafka, Maupassant, Ivan Klima, Jiri Grusa or Cocteau, the echoes amount to imitations which are, dare I say it, the highest form of flattery. It would be fine if these echoes were transcended, but they stick out like unpaid rental agreements ... The monotony is one of unhappiness, insecurity and mistrust, hardly ever leavened by intimations of joy or beauty. Flattery seems to enjoy her misery, but cannot make a virtue of it ... The intention seems not to describe emotions or to offer any unique insight so much as to impress with cleverness. There is no end to it ... There are sections of great power — emotional, ethical, aesthetic — but they do not add up to stories because there is no connecting Flattery. They are just word-bites, like bits of a bad-weather forecast strung together and adding up to a storm warning that is never fulfilled ... This is clever writing, but no more than that. Great writing provokes a great emotional response. I felt that I had been impressed by Flattery’s use of words, but never that I was in the presence of a pen with style.
Show Them A Good Time by Nicole Flattery is enthralling from start to finish – no dip, no task, no thought that perhaps the collection has been fleshed out with lesser pieces, the bookends the best part. In fact, by the time I reached Sweet Talk, number five of ten included, I was utterly engrossed ... Flattery is assured in her words, her style evident from page to page ... her prose excelling when we are gifted insights into the character she’s created. Flattery too, presents another side to her writing – the twisting sense of the unexpected. Oddness is instant, but delivered quietly, as though you should’ve always known it was there ... thrilling, confusing, beguiling, odd, and heartfelt.
If gender is a performance, then the Irish women in Flattery's disarming debut collection veer wildly off script ... Plot is not the engine here. Instead, Flattery's prose—absurd, painfully funny, and bracingly original—slingshots the stories forward. These female characters never say what you're expecting, and their insights are always incisive ... Nervy, audacious stories in which women finally get to speak their minds.
Disenchanted characters maneuver through difficult settings in Flattery’s surreal and offbeat debut collection. Though diverse in content, the stories come together through their dystopian elements and comparably cynical protagonists ... A seamless blend of reality and the surreal, Flattery’s stories defy genre in an affecting yet unobtrusive manner. Readers should expect to be equal parts intrigued and unsettled.
