Inside Warhol’s Factory: Nothing Special, by Nicole Flattery, reviewed

In 1965 Andy Warhol set out to record 24 one-hour audio cassettes focused on one of his ‘superstars’, the actor known as Ondine. The recordings later became a, A Novel, a Joycean distillation of a day in the life. Four typists, two of them teenagers, transcribed the cassettes verbatim – everything they heard on their headphones, every word, cough, gurgle, screech of chair or clink of glass. In his memoir POPism, Warhol mentions ‘two little high school girls’ who typed up his recordings. ‘The typists’ mistakes are all part of the process… that’s what makes it real.’

This is the inspiration for Nicole Flattery’s blade-sharp coming-of-age debut novel, Nothing Special. The narrator is Mae, dropping out of school, seizing the chance to escape a deadeningly drab home life: alcoholic mother, a future without hope. The virginal 17-year-old takes refuge in crowds, riding the escalators at Macy’s, floating free of the real world, shoplifting, hoping to pick up men. Then she walks into Warhol’s Factory in East 47th Street – walls and ceiling glittering with foil, floor and furniture painted silver – to spend days at the keyboard, ignored, observing everything, alongside her fellow typist Shelley, a complex soul, not quite what she seems. How would it feel to be a fly on the wall in this tacky decadence without ever being part of the messy melodrama?

Their lives out of control, the pair hurtle through days, ‘as though falling from a high window’. Wages are never discussed; occasional handouts are bestowed. The girls, ‘undereducated, easily led, desperate to please’, tag along to amphetamine-fuelled parties and dread reaching the last of the tapes.

Flattery, the Irish author of a prize-winning short story collection, captures the absurdity and the pain, the texture of city streets and the squalid luxury, and brings a deadpan wit to the whole sex and drugs and Pop-art scene.