Cupid calls
If your literary tastes lean toward the realistic — family dramas, torrid romances, anything with an emotional journey — Alissa Nutting’s second novel, “Made for Love,” won’t be for you. But if wackadoo narratives with hints of adventure and characters with bizarre personality quirks are more your speed, this weird and meandering puzzle of a book might be just the ticket. Maybe. The story has all the elements of absurdist fiction, some of which become immediately apparent as the book’s opening scene unfolds. It’s August 2019, and 32-year-old Hazel has just shown up at her 76-year-old father’s trailer in Shady Acres, a retirement community for adults over 55. He moved there after Hazel’s mother passed away from cancer.
But Dear Old Dad isn’t just wheeling around on his Rascal mobility scooter, chatting with the other white hairs when Hazel rolls up unannounced with a suitcase. Instead, he’s making himself quite comfortable with his new life-size doll ... er ... “companion” he calls Diane (who is quite voluptuous and anatomically correct, if you know what I mean).
This, of course, throws a bit of a wrench in Hazel’s plan to crash on his couch.
You see, Hazel is running away from her husband, Byron, who is a bit of a creep. Not your garden-variety creep, mind you. His eccentricities make Mr. Jealous Control Freak look like Mr. Rogers. Byron is the founder and CEO of Gogol Industries, a multimillion-dollar technology empire whose products are influencing and slowly becoming indispensable to every aspect of society. He wants to put a chip in Hazel’s brain so they can mind-meld and become “the first neural-networked couple in history.”
(So. Here is the first instance that might cause one of your eyebrows to rise just slightly — and it would have good reason to do so. Gogol? Really?! Why not name the fictional technology company Bapple? But no matter; back to the story.)
As we learn in various flashbacks, a naive and very broke Hazel met Byron when she was interviewing him for her college paper. They got married six months later and moved into his hyper-secure, super high-tech compound called The Hub (Think “Ex Machina” for visuals). Since then, she’s been bombarded with things like the GPS-activated nano chip implanted in her diamond ring and Byron’s ban on anything branded that isn’t Gogol because, according to him, other logos and trademarks are “visual energy drains.” There’s also, of course, the brain chip problem.
What this means is that still-flaky Hazel, who doesn’t love her man at all, has been married to what basically amounts to a robotic, unfeeling nerd with sociopathic tendencies for nearly a decade.
But wait! There’s a second plot line. Enter Jasper, a Jesuslike stud who earns his keep by wooing wealthy women and conning them out of their fortunes. For Jasper, all is going swimmingly until he nearly gets raped by a dolphin while going for a dunk in the ocean (um). This sparks an abnormal fascination with (i.e. unshakable sexual preference for) the aquatic creatures. Well, they do have blowholes. (Shudder.)
For most of the book, in fact until the very end, it’s not clear what these two threads have — or will have — in common. But while we’re busy scratching our heads (or maybe trying to wrangle our attention spans back in line), Hazel’s situation grows ever more precarious. The big question remains: Can she evade the pernicious tentacles of Byron’s reach or will he be able to successfully manipulate her back to his lair using Gogol’s fancy gadgets and various attempts at blackmail?
Here’s what “Made for Love” has going for it: As demonstrated in her debut, “Tampa” — a quasi-rewrite of Nabokov’s “Lolita,” except with a female rather than male Humbert Humbert — Nutting can sure drum up a real hoot of a sentence. Plus, she’s sure as your bottom not afraid to stretch the boundaries of what’s considered hot as far as sexual preferences are concerned. (As in “Tampa,” the “Ewwwwy!” quotient is pretty strong.)
Unfortunately, that’s where the gushing ends. While Byron is certainly a menace, albeit a wimpy and geeky one, it’s hard to imagine that he’d actually kill Hazel if she didn’t come back to him, as the narrative would have you believe. And while it is admittedly terrifying to imagine a world in which mind-melds were possible and it is easy to draw comparisons to our Facebook/ Twitter/Instagram/Apple/ Microsoft/Amazon-reliant (obsessed) society, it’s equally clear that such things have been written about before. Sometimes the same old metaphors, the same old parallels, just become tired.
But let’s end on a high note. As in many technology-driven adventure stories featuring a slightly awkward female heroine, “Made for Love” does have a happy-ish ending — and it’s funny, sort of. This one involves not one, but two dead bodies. Whether the grand finale is worth the wait is up for you to decide.
Alexis Burling’s reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Oregonian. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com