#52: Made for Love by Alissa Nutting
She didn’t know the full extent of the changes Byron wanted to usher into mankind, but they didn’t seem like they were going to foster nurturing human connections.
Published 2017 | 310 Pages
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Contemporary, Feminist, Technology
This may sound crazy, but I started reading this book fully expecting not to like it. And you know, I think that mindset helped! My expectations were low and I was pleasantly surprised. After not hating it 30 pages in, I decided to keep reading. By the end, I found that I had highlighted several parts, giggled at several parts, felt empathy, and learned a few things.
This won’t be for everyone. I wouldn’t recommend it to my mom, for example. The characters are flawed and somewhat emotionally wrecked and use booze and sex to cope. I detested one storyline because it dabbled in bestiality and was just plain weird. Ms. Nutting is not shy in her writing about the sexuality of her characters and for a Ned Flanders like me, it got uncomfortable at times. That said, most books don’t stick the landing for me and this one, surprisingly, did. It was well worth the discomfort to arrive at a satisfying and unpredictable conclusion.
What’s it about?
The protagonist, Hazel Green, has just run away from her tech-mogul husband back to her childhood home and widower father. Her husband, Byron Gogol, is a psycho and wants to put a computer chip in her brain to “meld” her mind with his. Her father, Herbert, is a critical curmudgeon with his own issues. Hazel goes from one desperate, emotionally starving existence to another and neither option is pleasant.
While Ms. Nutting provides insightful commentary on our relationship with technology and lack of privacy, this is mostly about Hazel’s relationships with herself and her dad. Hazel’s emotional arc made me hurt for real people who struggle with similar feelings of self-loathing and despair. I work with one such person and I want to hug her and tell her she’s doing great work all the time.
Do you know how when people are really hungry they will be driven to eat the inedible? Grass and soil and the like? That also happens with love. If you want love badly enough, you will start gobbling harmful substitutes like attention and possessions. Do you know what I thought when I first met Byron? ‘He doesn’t seem to hate me! I can easily work with this!’
What are others saying?
I recommend you check out Merritt Tierce’s stellar review in New York Times. Here is a sample:
Nutting…romanticizes nothing…: not marriage, not love, not family, not sex, especially not technology — and definitely not finding one’s way in the world, since many people, she realizes, don’t. Hazel is rudderless, ordinary, passive; all the more impressive, then, is Nutting’s creation of a compelling, wholly sympathetic character from such a beige moral blob.
Haha, nailed it! I have to say, I mostly enjoyed being on this journey with the beige moral blob that is Hazel. I know some of you will too.
What about the HBO show?
Yeah, I watched that too. It wasn’t my favorite and it is very different. Aside from the principal characters and key plot point of “becoming an evil tech genius’s science-project wife,” they are their own unique art. Nutting had a hand in the show and she seems to have enjoyed taking it in a new direction.
Thanks for reading and please let me know what book dolphins you’ve been swimming with lately.
Kyle