Dirty Words: Tampa (Ecco) by Alissa Nutting

You can judge this book by its cover, a tawdry black velvet dust-cover, which, while holding it, creates a tactile experience mirroring the feelings rising up when reading its printed pages. That book is Tampa by Alissa Nutting, the story of a beautiful female pedophile systematically stalking a 14-year-old student in the public school at which she teaches. It is icky and explicit. But how could it be otherwise? 

Told in the first person by the pedophile, anything less than pornographic would be false. That doesn't mean people will want to read it, being buried in her psychopathic mind is uncomfortable, but uncomfortableness is inherent in uncomfortable material. All the stranger if you’ve got the hardcover in your hands, your fingers caressing the kitschy fabric. It feels like a betrayal long past the point of turning back. 

The novel is now out in paperback and its jacket designer has continued commenting on the filth inside, but without the sensual come-on on the hardcover. Instead, the designer plays with a visual pun, a close up of a button hole, which will have you fingering your dress shirts in a wholly inappropriate way. 

Even the author’s name, maybe in the context of these double-entendre cover designs, becomes a jumble of hidden erotica waiting for the reader to unravel. The mirroring of double letters in her first- and surname like secondary sexual characteristics. It’s as if by squinting, or maybe looking askew like one of those 3D magic-eye posters, will conjure the predator narrator offering our immature selves a carnal invitation to party with impunity. 

There is little if any judgement. If this is a moral literature, it doesn’t wear its ethics on its sleeve. The story unfolds almost mechanically, for our narrator is motivated and has placed herself in a position where she can fulfill her desires, after that it all moves as clockwork. 

Things don’t end up as the narrator expects, nor as the reader does, either. It’s not a spoiler to mention that the plot plays out as the narrator has set it in motion, delivering a couple of young boys into her web, with sex scenes too explicit to legally summarize here. It’s not a spoiler because plot is only a small part of the whole enjoyment of this or any story. So enough with the spoiler alerts already! If detailing an A-B-C developmental arc ruins a piece of entertainment than it was just a piece of shit.

Okay, enough tangential ranting. What’s interesting is not the sex, not that the predator in this case is a female, a trope of adolescent fantasy likely since their were adolescents, though turning the tables on our expectations is always going to serve up something interesting. But what is most curious is the readers’ reactions, and they are myriad. 

Certainly, on a purely prurient level, this book could be enjoyed as blue, if one can divorce themselves from its unseemly scenario. However, it’s unlikely that these readers are but a very small, and probably unhealthy, minority. More in the majority are the moralizers, the shocked, the curious, the confused, for there are no easy answers. Nutting doesn’t lead her readers by a leash, though some would undoubtedly like that.

Our narrator is caught by the law and prosecuted. But things work out pretty well for her. There is no epiphany, no jailhouse suicide. Society doesn’t lock her up and throw away the key, as much as give it to her for a future key party. Mostly, it felt like a happy ending. And everyone likes happy endings, right? 

Buy "Tampa" by Alissa Nutting Here