Tampa by Alissa Nutting

Tampa

by Alissa Nutting

Celeste Price is an eighth-grade English teacher in suburban Tampa. She is attractive. She drives a red Corvette. Her husband, Ford, is rich, square-jawed and devoted to her. But Celeste has a secret. She has a singular sexual obsession - fourteen-year-old boys. It is a craving she pursues with sociopathic meticulousness and forethought.
Within weeks of her first term at a new school, Celeste has lured the charmingly modest Jack Patrick into her web - car rides after dark, rendezvous at Jack's house while his single father works the late shift, and body-slamming encounters in Celeste's empty classroom between periods. It is bliss.

Celeste must constantly confront the forces threatening their affair - the perpetual risk of exposure, Jack's father's own attraction to her, and the ticking clock as Jack leaves innocent boyhood behind. But the insatiable Celeste is remorseless. She deceives everyone, is close to no one and cares little for anything but her pleasure.

With crackling, stampeding, rampantly sexualized prose, Tampa is a grand, satirical, serio-comic examination of desire and a scorching literary debut.

Reviewed by rohshey on

3 of 5 stars

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Well, one things us for sure, Tampa is readable af, it rocks along nicely, it's fun...but that's about it. It's pretty run of the mill predictable kind of stuff and without putting a spoiler in here, some of the plot developments seem convenient rather than remotely believable.

Celeste reminded me of Patrick Bateman from American pyscho, and there is the cold detachment in describing their crimes. But Patrick seems to lack any feeling towards anyone, friends and/or victims, which leans to a sociopath. While Celeste relishes her victims loss of innocence and her emasculated husband, which puts her as a psychopath. I think she has more in common with Humbert but unlike Lolita, it is certainly lacking the whimsical prose, deep psychological study, and excellent characterization of Lolita.

Under the mastery of Humbert, he manipulated readers into eventually empathising with Humbert but with Tampa, Celeste come across as abominable caricature. After spending such a long time in Celeste's head, I feel like didn't really know her. Her drive in her relationship is purely sexual, but that's the only thing there. Maybe that's the point of the book.. I don't know. There is honestly nothing new here.

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  • Started reading
  • 5 October, 2017: Finished reading
  • 5 October, 2017: Reviewed