Andy Warhol once wrote that his “great unfulfilled ambition” was to have a regular television program, which he’d call Nothing Special. His dream show never aired, but the Irish writer Nicole Flattery still borrowed its name for her debut novel, which is set largely in Warhol’s Factory in 1966. In a February conversation with the Irish Times, Flattery admitted that calling her novel Nothing Special may have been “setting myself up for critics in a very bad way” — which isn’t wholly wrong. 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: that of a disaffected young woman trying halfheartedly to sort out her life.
Disaffected young women were the primary subjects of Flattery’s 2018 story collection Show Them a Good Time, which is set in present-day Ireland. It earned significant acclaim, and rightly: In it, Flattery’s prose is knife-sharp, displaying her keen eye for the sorts of ugliness that often go unremarked. Nothing Special is similarly interested in the brutal and banal. Mae, its protagonist, is a high-school dropout based loosely on one of the girls who, in real life, typed the tapes — mainly recordings of Warhol speaking to his friend Ondine — that formed Warhol’s 1986 novel a. Her mother, a waitress with a drinking problem and a complex love life, seems to have passed along her outsized “understanding of human frailty,” which serves Mae well in her work. Rather than being shocked by the druggy, dirty recordings she transcribes, Mae swiftly sees their power, which comes from Ondine’s “willingness to be ugly. How enlivening ugliness was, it cut right through the bullshit.” In Nothing Special, the same is often true. It’s at its best in small, hideous moments: an unsavory lover rubbing Mae’s “small, pudgy stomach … as if I was a sick animal,” or the cruel remembered comment that “art was what women of a certain class took up when they lost their looks.”
But 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. She’s highly attuned to details that denote social status — the yellowing walls in one apartment, the pricey rugs in another — but does not go to any lengths to evoke the visual, historic, or sonic detail of 1960s New York. She does not even adjust her prose from Irish to American; characters drop the got in you’ve got, set drinks on beer mats rather than coasters. Small oversights, yes, but it is from nuance that tone emerges, and in its tone, Nothing Special is oddly placeless and timeless. Beyond Warhol and his project, there’s not much to anchor the novel in its moment. It turns into a story of a lost girl, washed up in a Factory that could, for all its peculiarities, be pretty much anywhere.
Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery (2023) is published by Bloomsbury Publishing and is available online and in bookstores.
