Alissa Nutting's mind-blowing debut, Tampa, is, like Nabokov's Lolita, a story of illicit sexual obsession and corrupted innocence; its narrator a highly literate adult who preys on early adolescents. But Tampa is a slimy, sticky inversion of the classic old-man-meets-young-girl scenario--and Celeste Price, the novel's unrepentant narrator, has more in common with American Psycho than Humbert Humbert.
A self-admitted "soulless pervert," Celeste is 26, smoking hot and married to a rich, handsome idiot. Her marriage, like her new job teaching eighth-grade English, is a brutally calculated cover for her sole passion: a voracious lust for 14-year-old boys.
Tampa is not a confession--the word implies contrition--but rather an unadulterated account of Celeste's seduction of one of her students. Jack Patrick, "a stretch-limbed version of a younger boy," is the perfect mark: sweet, wholesome and absently parented by a single father. The contrast between Jack's innocence and Celeste's predatory, salacious manipulation is both repulsive and mesmerizing. In a testament to Nutting's stunning talent, the sex--and there's a lot of it--is extremely explicit and yet undeniably artful.
The story takes on the swampy, close heat of the Tampa suburbs as Celeste recounts her increasingly depraved transgressions, and the collateral victims pile up. She isn't interested in gaining the reader's sympathy, so--unlike Humbert--there is no reason to think she's anything less than chillingly honest, even though she deceives everyone else.
Celeste keeps getting away with it for the same reason that you'll keep reading about her: she's abhorrent, but she's fascinating--and Nutting has announced herself as a writer who is as gifted as she is bold. --Hannah Calkins, blogger at Unpunished Vice