Life Has Always Been a Performance

Copies can be so much more appealing than their originals: Think of Andy Warhol’s silk-screened prints of Elizabeth Taylor and Mao Zedong and Jacqueline Kennedy, his hand-painted reproductions of Campbell’s soup cans. The title of Nothing Special, the Irish writer Nicole Flattery’s new novel, is itself a copy, derived, as Flattery has said, from an idea that Warhol once dreamed up for an unproduced talk show called The Nothing Special, which he envisioned to be about, well, nothing in particular.

One can imagine an editor coolly slicing off the of the original title from Flattery’s manuscript, imbuing it with that kind of muted disaffection that has become something of a trend among recent and Naoise Dolan’s . Unlike those works, though, Flattery’s novel—her first, following her 2019 short-story collection, —looks to the past, taking place in the New York City of the 1960s and, later, the early 2010s. We follow Mae, the working-class daughter of a waitress, first as a high schooler in 1967 and then as a middle-aged woman during the Internet-flush world of the new millennium, as she recalls the period she spent as a teenager transcribing a series of tape recordings made by Warhol at his Factory.