Nothing Special by Nichole Flattery

Wow, a new and different take on Any Warhol and the Factory. This centers on the making of Warhol’s work entitle A Novel (1968), an experimental slice-of-life breeze block built from taped conversations typed up by two schoolgirls, one of whom the author imagines as our narrator, Mae. We join her in 2010, deep in middle age, before we cut quickly back to 1966, when she’s 17, riding escalators with an eye out for male attention, having been cold-shouldered at school and left alone by her mother, a waitress with a drink problem and an on-off boyfriend whose household presence seldom seems healthy. So an escape to The Factory would have at least initially been welcome, and then what it was, and the effects it left are what are imagined for the rest of the book. It is a bit psychodelic in tone at time, capturing what I see it as having been like watching some of his movies--also about nothing, a relic of a gone by era.