Strange Happenings: A Review of Nicole Flattery’s Show Them A Good Time
Show Them A Good Time
Nicole Flattery
Bloomsbury
January 2020
ISBN: 978-1635574296
256 pages
reviewed by Megan Evershed
In Nicole Flattery’s short story, “Track,” the narrator describes her hometown as “a strange place dressed up as a normal place.” This description could describe multiple places in Flattery’s stories, but it also aptly characterizes the stories themselves—they are, for the most part, vaguely surreal creations attired in normal costumes.
“Track” is one of eight stories in Show Them A Good Time, Flattery’s imaginative and arresting debut collection. Like “Track,” many of her stories are unsettled by bizarre plot points or strange narrative details. In “Sweet Talk,” for instance, the narrator picks out a “trail of dead flies” from inside her mouth. In “Hump,” a woman notices a growth on her back, “like a golf ball or a marble,” after her father’s funeral. These little twists of surreality aren’t the focal points of the stories; they’re just details making up the landscape. Strange happenings are embedded in the daily lives of Flattery’s characters—making their occurrence that much more threatening and disorienting.
Like Miranda July and Melissa Broder, Flattery is interested in the dark comedy of women’s lives. While on a date during an apocalypse, one of Flattery’s characters sips a gin and tonic. “It was impossible to look wise, and to project an air of disinterest in various earthly disasters,” Flattery writes, “while using a straw.” She has a practiced eye for phrasing which is both amusing and exact. In particular, her adjectives are chosen with sharp precision: in a story narrated by a disaffected teenager, bored schoolgirls snap their hair into “humorless” ponytails. In a story about a directionless art school dropout pretending “to be a tourist” in Paris, a rat infestation poster on her apartment door features a rodent that looks “motivated.” These descriptors are perfectly calibrated—they encapsulate the mood of their stories and the characters who inhabit them.
Flattery’s protagonists are bored, unhappy, disappointed, depressed. In an essay on her collection, Flattery notes that she has “an interest in dead, unproductive time.” In the stories, moments of dramatic tension have happened in the past and are obliquely hinted at, but their revelation isn’t of any real interest. Flattery prefers to dwell in the aftermath of the climax—after the parent’s death, after the disruptive affair, after the hospitalization and subsequent displacement to New York, after leaving the abusive boyfriend. In this collection, Flattery asks: what is life like after the intensity of its pivotal events has faded?
Fittingly, her sentences are inflected with an unbothered, level timbre. This is particularly evident in “Hump.” As in Deborah Levy’s work—who, incidentally, has also written a story about a character with a hunchback—the bodily difference of Flattery’s character serves a larger purpose. More specifically, the growth on the character’s back prompts her realization that the people in her life don’t care about her. She realizes while drinking with friends that “they would never rub their hands across [her] spine and check for signs of roundness whilst making soft reassurances.” The man she’s sleeping with “refuse[s]” to “perform a thermal massage on [her] back and growing hump.” These moments aren’t depicted as instances of dramatic reckoning; they’re reflected on nonchalantly by the narrator, as if none of this really matters.
The narrator’s lover in “Hump” is also her boss. Relationships with a power imbalance are a dominant theme in Flattery’s collection, whether through age disparities, financial dependence, or asymmetries in the workplace. The protagonist of the title story used to live with a film director boyfriend who hit her in their private life and directed her in their public one. In another story, titled “Abortion: A Love Story,” a university student has an affair with a professor. And in “Track,” the narrator lives in her boyfriend’s apartment and doesn’t work much because she doesn’t have to; her boyfriend simply “gifted her a roll of cash.” Later in the story, he has sex with his coworker in the apartment. “It wasn’t a secret,” the narrator says. “I was supposed to hear.”
In Flattery’s stories, intimacy or the possibility of love seem almost dystopian. Angela, the woman who online dates during the apocalypse, “invariably” comes to the realization that, rather than being “the whole package,” each guy she dates is “an envelope, an envelope with a bill in it, an envelope she, quite frankly, wanted to put in a drawer and forget all about.” The narrator of “Parrot,” who seems to be one of the only characters who has the potential to have a happy relationship, falls in love unexpectedly:
“They always went to the same B&B, the same room, fringed lamps and light curtains. It was like an affair made on an assembly line, everyone playing their part, following a strict pattern. No poetry, no sunlight on the bedsheets. The only surprise was when she found, unbelievably, like discovering a hidden room in a house, that she was in love with him.”
The affair is presented as unromantic and manufactured, and yet, seemingly against the odds, genuine human connection manages to shine through the “fringed lamps and light curtains.” As well as factory language, Flattery uses the language of the theater to describe the affair—she writes that “everyone [was] playing their part.” The invocation of performance in this passage is repeated at another point in the story, when the narrator ends up marrying the man. Her friends are surprised: “they thought the production of her life, always entertaining, was never going to end.” Women’s lives are frequently figured in performative vocabulary throughout the collection. In “Show Them A Good Time,” the narrator says, “I felt like anyone could step in and play me, if they were supplied with the correct expression of anguish, the sluggish reactions of someone baffled by their own poor choices.”
The idea of women performing their own lives is particularly pertinent in Flattery’s longest story, “Abortion: A Love Story.” The story, organized structurally into three parts—almost as if it were divided into theatrical acts—documents the lives of Natasha and Lucy. We learn that, when Natasha entered university, she started dating “a stick-thin” boy called Patrick. Patrick ends up breaking it off with Natasha, and afterwards, “she wept loudly, not knowing if they were real or fake tears.” This blurring between the real and the fake, and the difficulty in parsing which is which, is echoed later on. The third act of the story details a play that Natasha and Lucy perform which repurposes material from their actual lives. The truth is therefore refracted through the prism of performance, through a simulacrum of reality. As with Flattery’s other, more overtly surreal stories, there’s something slant about “Abortion,” something that defies clean lines.
“Abortion” comes before “Track” in the collection, and in these two stories, Flattery echoes herself. Similarly to when the narrator of “Track” describes her hometown as “a strange place dressed up as a normal place,” Flattery writes of Natasha: “She was a strange person pretending to be a normal person.” There are multiple instances of the strange and the normal bumping heads in Flattery’s stories, and the result is a collection that makes the reader question which is which, over and over again.
Nicole Flattery's (@nicoleflattery) work has been published in The Stinging Fly, The White Review, The Dublin Review, BBC Radio 4, The Irish Times and Winter Papers. She has also contributed a story to Faber's 2019 Anthology of New Irish Writing. A graduate of the master's program in Creative Writing at Trinity College, Dublin, she lives in Galway.
Megan Evershed (@megsevershed) is a writer whose work has appeared in i-D, Prospect Magazine, and the Rupture Magazine.