NOTHING SPECIAL

Andy Warhol and his Factory are seen from the disaffected point of view of a teenage typist in Flattery's bleakly funny debut novel.

In 1966, 17-year-old Mae, living with a mercurial waitress mother and her mom's sometime boyfriend, is bored with school and alienated from her one friend there. After weeks spent riding department store escalators and a one-night stand with a creepy young businessman, Mae stumbles into a typing gig at Warhol’s studio, one for which she is paid only occasionally, when there's some cash lying around. After a brief stint answering phones and typing up letters begging the parents of Warhol’s hangers-on for money, she is assigned the task of typing up verbatim a series of tape recordings of conversations in the studio, mostly between Warhol and actor Ondine, which will form a fictionalized version of Warhol's book a, A Novel. Warhol, seldom mentioned by name, is a shadowy presence in the background of the commotion created by his followers, some of whom call him Drella, a combination of Dracula and Cinderella. “Everyone else forgot about the tape recorder,” Mae writes. “…Drella never did.” The typists themselves play a complicated role in the goings-on, at least in their own minds. “For several hours a day we had all the power. Then we stepped into the real world and had none,” Mae thinks. While oddly British locutions—ordinary New Yorkers saying things like “You’ve a very goofy personality” or “Will we order drinks?”—sometimes threaten the credibility of the novel, it pulls the reader deeply into Mae's increasingly fragile mind, where the desultory, performative conversations she spends her days transcribing threaten her ability to shape a life for herself. Like the conversations the young women transcribe, the novel is a strangely compelling combination of the soporifically mundane and the bracingly odd.

Not just for Warhol fans.