In Alissa Nutting’s novel Tampa, Celeste Price, a smoldering 26-year-old middle-school teacher in Florida, unrepentantly recounts her elaborate and sociopathically determined seduction of a 14-year-old student. Celeste has chosen and lured the charmingly modest Jack Patrick into her web. Jack is enthralled and in awe of his eighth-grade teacher, and, most importantly, willing to accept Celeste’s terms for a secret relationship—car rides after dark, rendezvous at Jack’s house while his single father works the late shift, and body-slamming erotic encounters in Celeste’s empty classroom. In slaking her sexual thirst, Celeste Price is remorseless and deviously free of hesitation, a monstress of pure motivation. She deceives everyone, is close to no one, and cares little for anything but her pleasure. Tampa is a sexually explicit, virtuosically satirical, American Psycho–esque rendering of a monstrously misplaced but undeterrable desire. Laced with black humor and crackling sexualized prose, Alissa Nutting’s Tampa is a grand, seriocomic examination of the want behind student / teacher affairs and a scorching literary debut.
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Did I just give a book about pedophilia 4 stars?
If you know me in real life, no you don't.
Tampa is bold - if the cover alone didn't tell you that, the synopsis certainly will. You know what you're getting into the second you crack the cover, and Nutting drops us right into the twisted, sexually deviant mind of our protagonist Celeste from the very first page (literally: the first line opens with Celeste masturbating in anticipation of her teaching gig starting soon).
Nutting's tone throughout is witty, cutting, and at times humorous; no small feat considering 30+% of the book is describing 14 year-old boys' genitals. You may ask yourself: why would I read something like this? I have a few answers for you.
1. The story and the writing alone are masterful. Nutting knows her way around a sentence, and this is by definition a page turner. This is engrossing, and gross, and provocative. This is anything but boring.
2. We see so many stories about sexual exploitation and predation on young girls; I have never read a story where the victims are young boys. From this new-to-me vantage point, the manipulation and grooming hit harder. This tired narrative was given a new rawness that made it hit that much harder. Being inside the mind of a woman, I was able to understand the protagonist in a way I will never be able to understand a male protagonist, which made the cunning, exploitation, and psychopathic manipulation more real.
3. Without any spoilers, Nutting poses a very controversial question that I'm even hesitant to outline here: are boys less affected by female pedophiles than girls are by male abusers?
I'm glad there's space in publishing for books like Tampa. This is what makes fiction great.
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