Raymond Chandler for the #MeToo era

Lisa Taddeo, chronicler of American women’s sex lives, has written a swaggering, noirish debut novel

ANIMAL by Lisa Taddeo 336pp, Bloomsbury, T £14.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £16.99, ebook £8.59

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Lisa Taddeo’s 2019 nonfiction book, Three Women, was a muchpraised, bestselling investigation into female desire that drew with novelistic flair on the sexual testimonies of three American women she interviewed over eight years. Many of its themes – the predatory omniscience of the male gaze, the unequal dynamic between men and women, the often joylessly attritional nature of it all – resurface with noirish swagger in Taddeo’s debut novel, Animal, which, for the first few chapters at least, flaunts an alluringly hard-boiled sexual cynicism. Take this for an opening sentence: “I drove myself out of New York City where a man shot himself in front of me.” It’s like Raymond Chandler narrated by a femme fatale.

Our thirtysomething narrator, Joan, is indeed something of a femme fatale, albeit a very angry one, and also, we soon realise, a bit of a tease. At the start of the second chapter, she describes herself, for what won’t be the last time, as “depraved”. A “dark death thing” happened to her when she was a child, encouraging us to turn the pages to find out more. It’s the literary equivalent of clickbait.

And so we read on. After the shooting – the victim, Vic, was Joan’s married lover; she was having dinner with another married lover at the time – Joan drives west to canyon country and holes up in a ramshackle lodging house amid the snakes and coyotes in search of a woman called Alice, whose relevance to her story is revealed only towards the end. Joan wears her dead mother’s white dress and starts cultivating both an intimate, confiding relationship with the unwitting Alice and a weirdly complicit one with her repulsive, semisenile landlord, Lenny, who keeps mistaking her for his dead wife, Lenore. She also has a brief fling with a sexy chap called River, who

lives nearby in a yurt.

The literary equivalent of clickbait? Lisa Taddeo

Meanwhile, Vic’s grief-unhinged widow keeps texting Joan obscenities and warning that her daughter is coming to kill her.

Joan can be thrillingly bleak on adultery. “It’s funny to think how many corporate dollars are spent so one man can f--- a woman,” she says, on the efforts Vic went to in advantageously arranging his business schedule. Taddeo excels, too, at sharp, parched one-liners: Los Angeles is a city of “mauve stucco, criminals and glitter”; Joan defines herself against the type of women who “store their winter clothes for the summer”. But as Joan’s fury boils over at what she’s endured throughout her life at the hands of abusive, faithless men, the increasingly hot, strung-out mood starts to resemble Sam Shepard spliced with The Oresteia for the MeToo generation. One begins to weary of the coyotes howling every time blood is spilt, of the many references to a stranger’s rapist gaze, of Joan’s posturing statements of murderous intent. “I knew I would sooner kill her,” says Joan, talking about her attachment to Vic’s teenage daughter, who has indeed pitched up brandishing a pistol. “Because sometimes it’s better to kill someone than to leave them.” Is it?

Moreover, Taddeo has an eye for the unedifying that feels almost unseemly. “I let him finish on my chest,” says Joan, recalling one random night with a bartender (far too much of the novel is padded out with anecdotal sexual experience, much of it grim). “I remember the colour was a terrible greenish hue.” There is a ghastly scene involving a miscarriage and some truly astonishing dialogue. “I wonder if you know how rage can stiffen the shaft. It’s like a war cry. I left the house engorged,” confides Lenny to Joan at one point. Crikey.

Female rage, pain, trauma: these are buzzwords in publishing at the moment and Taddeo’s messily uncompromising portrait of a woman falling into the arms of one treacherous man after another, compelled to re-enact in adulthood the damage she endured in childhood, fits right in. Animal burns with an almost militant frenzy against the codification of female behaviour, the way women’s lives are packaged into boxes, the way daughters inherit their mothers’ suffering. And yet. The uneven atmospherics, the lurching febrile tone and the increasingly mad plotting veer more towards the exploitative than the revealing. Taddeo has plenty to say but alas, in this novel, I just can’t take her seriously.