Tampa: Hot For Students
“The writing is pretty terrific even as the sex gets tedious”
Review by John Barrios
+++
When I was 14 I dreamed of sucking my French teacher’s nipples. Our school’s Spanish teacher intentionally wore thick sweaters as her erasers would surely be too prominent for any shirt. It is a truth of male adolescence that we want to have sex with our teachers. We want to dominate that which is there to raise us, those in charge, so as to feel authoritative where there is no reckoning of authority. Isn’t that what a bully is? So as I read Tampa by first time novelist Alissa Nutting, I quickly began enjoying it from the side of the kid, knowing full well I was ignoring the basic truth of the book, that, behind some well written smut, this is a novel about a female pedophiliac.
Tampa is at first, quite a welcome surprise. The prose is unpretentious, and brings the reader to their knees early on. I was at once turned on and slowly turned off. It is a master stroke for a young novelist to lure the reader into a world which most do not care to enter, that of a sociopath, a pedophile mind.
It is a decent read until it becomes too racy for its own good. Too much sex with children (no matter how much it fed my youthful fantasy, I mean really, the fantasy doesn’t go away because we grow up. It reheats the brain when we as adults glimpse our prescient, haunted past, as if we might still have a shot!) and then too much sex with banal adults. The writing is pretty terrific even as the sex gets tedious, as too much of anything can be. I mean, it’s like a good horror movie, you need not give too much of the monster away too soon, or the audience won’t be scared at the end, and here, I wasn’t turned on anymore, the writing wasn’t enough, the point, whatever there was left of one, dissipated.
I did some googling and found that Alissa Nutting was a classmate of the 14-year-old who was seduced by Debra Lavare. Perhaps Nutting was trying to find a voice of reason around the Debra Lavare case. Perhaps fiction as a means of understanding the world we grew out of and into is enough reason to contextualize the internal content therein. What is fiction good for if not for better understanding society? Unfortunately, I do not fancy to be in the mind of this sociopath for the duration. Once I got past the quick and unsatisfying nebulousness of my childhood humors, I was left cold, unsexed, and uneducated by a book whose only purpose should be to find a moral truth. Perhaps with pedophilia, there is no moral truth, and therein lies the ultimate problem.
+ + +