![]() ![]() ![]() Hazel never quite emerges as a fully formed person, which makes it hard to remain interested in her. But character-building is not among her strengths. ![]() Nutting’s prose style is distinctive, and the narrative is shot through with her inventive language, and she’s adept at creating darkly absurd situations. There’s also a parallel story about Jasper, a con artist who develops a sexual and romantic attachment to dolphins after a male bottlenose tries to rape him. Much of the novel is set in 2019, after Hazel has left her husband, but there are flashbacks to her courtship-if we can call it that-and life in Byron’s compound. When the story begins, she's trying to escape her marriage to Byron-and hoping to avoid being assassinated by her obsessive spouse. Hazel was well on her way to becoming a standard-issue screw-up when she met tech billionaire Byron Gogol. ![]() They are attention-getting, certainly, and the mix of barefaced candor and mordant humor will be familiar to the author’s fans, as will the deeply flawed protagonist. The kind designed to provide a sexual experience that came as close as possible to having sex with a living (or maybe, Hazel thought, a more apt analogy was a very-very-recently deceased) female.” These are the first lines of Nutting’s second novel (her first book was a collection of short fiction). “Hazel’s 76-year-old father had bought a doll. A glimpse into the future-which looks a lot like the present-from the author of Tampa (2013) and Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls (2011). ![]()
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