![]() ![]() Nutting deftly illustrates the uncanny creep of the technological into the realm of affect, but what’s truly creepy is how ordinary it all comes to seem. Encounters with parental desire are notoriously, timelessly cringeworthy, but some of us are fated to have more of them than others. Hazel’s confrontation with her father’s geriatric-but enthusiastic-sexuality is the novel’s great gift. Even so, the book is a total joyride, dizzying and surprising, like a state-fair roller coaster that makes you queasy for a moment but leaves you euphoric in the end. ![]() ![]() There is no redemptive thesis in Made for Love whatsoever: when Hazel begins to gradually emerge from her chrysalis of pathos and male entrapment, she’s much the worse for what she’s gone through. ![]() And she has a knack for placing moments of tender horror where straightforward affection might otherwise live. Nutting gets enormous mileage out of the labyrinthine ways in which her characters redirect their romantic impulses. She is the rare literary heroine in whose company it would be a pleasure to absolutely wreck my life. It is, for that reason, a profound relief to meet Hazel, the passive, hapless, magnificently abject protagonist of Alissa Nutting’s deranged new comic novel.I loved Hazel immediately, the way I love drunk women who instigate alarmingly personal conversations in bar bathrooms. These days, in certain corners, it’s something akin to a truism that every woman is a warrior, a badass, a queen. ![]()
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