Q

Began and finished Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting today.

It was the kind of book that even while reading it i understood it had a genius significant beyond present engagement; the kind i itched to write about after to make sense of just why it is so good.

It had the eclectic premises i so loved from George Saunders: to address overpopulation, all people had to host another organism on their bodies, a women chose to have an ant colony drilled into her bones – she is later consumed and becomes one with the herd; A porn star sits through a eat-all contest, she is to have anal sex in space with the winner; A mortician smokes the hair of corpses and hallucinates their memories.

She does this with a startling clarity of unorthodox metaphor, and just the right amount of epigrams. Even the prose was reminiscent of Saunders at his best: concise, unpretentious, in your point – but so cleverly delivered.

Probably the insight i’ve most gratefully plucked from Nutting’s work, though, is that the best satire does not take a stand. ‘Teenager’ finds the frighteningly casual take of a young girl on sex and her abortion. Nutting frees herself from the onus of criticism – she merely portrays the characters as they are: bored, flippant. If any judgements were made, other roles did so on her behalf.

The pre-abortion counselor takes on the role of adult, of conservative persecutor: “It’s hard to understand the concept of something being permanent,” she says of abortion. “Having a baby is just as permanent as not having a baby,” retorts our protagonist.

There is truth in what the teenager said. There is also something vaguely self-righteous and therefore annoying about the counsellor. At the same time there is a disturbing, detached cruelty shading the teen that we cannot shake off. She says of giving birth:

Vaginal elasticity is a secondary concern […] My vag must stay like the glove in the infamous OJ Simplson trial: too small to fit unless the wearer really, really wants it to.

We’re forced to think for ourselves, make the call on what we think is right – or realize that there is no right/wrong dichotomy.

Later, she filches her grandmother’s (on the brink of death and speech-device ala Hawkings) credit card to pay for the abortion. At the juncture between with-fetus and near-death she observes

It is so gross how we are born and so gross how we die.

There is something striking how simply Nutting has laid out this fact, as if we are for the first time having a truth brought into sharp focus. Like it has always been there, its truthfulness never verified nor denied, but just there – and then all of a sudden pulled inwards from our peripheral vision.

Another merit is Nutting’s chameleon-like abilities with perspective taking. She shape-shifts from laughable self-deceiving gullibility to resigned, precocious, apathetic, desperate.

My favorite character of hers was probably that of the porn star. We know little of her but her current thoughts. I found it especially poignant in the small way she enjoyed being a formless, androgynous figure when slipped into the space suit. She has a quiet desire that we are given just the bare crumbs of, making her a mystery. As the man enters her anally in space, she thinks:

I feel fine but also very strange, looking at the world and its distance. I feel its weight in my stomach like a pregnancy, like an old meal. When I want to, I cover up the Earth and its oceans with my hand, and then even with the cameras it seems like no one can see me.

There is something so sad but so hopeful contained in a single imagery, and it is such a perfect imagery precisely because it evokes a shade that i cannot explicate in words.

Another, less elusive one, that got me:

My phone is a tightly shut clam and all the badness that happened inside is going to irritate itself into a pearl.

In ‘Teenager’, in the moment of teenage life gone to shit. Drawing back from more incomprehensible feelings we get the one almost everyone has experienced. The moment of dread and thrill when we’re swimming in drama and are just waiting for the shit-storm to stir and settle before we tentatively step back to reveal the collateral damage.

Very much in love with this and am hoping Alissa Nutting has written more.