Emotionally, my impulse is to give this novel three or three and a half stars, but it was so well written and interesting to think about on a more intellectual level that I just have to up it to four stars.
Tampa is definitely not a book for the faint of heart, nor is it for literature Puritans who insist on sanitizing away the nastier bits of human existence from the written word, as if that will make them stop existing. Nor is it for people who can’t separate a piece of (admittedly, provocative) art from the feelings and beliefs of its creator. Whether or not this story has a larger point to make about the human condition is going to be a completely separate discussion, but the book is an undeniably well-written psychological portrait of a character so dysfunctional and driven by her own outlying desires that in the reader’s mind, the question isn’t “Will this woman be caught?” but instead, “How and when will she be caught, and what kind of collateral damage will she cause on her way?”
For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Tampa is a sort of reverse Lolita, but only in the most basic terms. Humbert Humbert’s story is also one of destructive desire, but his malfunction didn’t make him any less human. At its most basic, Lolita is a fucked up love story, in which a man ruins the life of a young girl out of a perverted obsessive love for her that he has convinced himself is pure and innocent. This book, though, and its narrator Celeste, are not interested in such concepts as love. And Celeste is under no delusions of her own identity and desires. She knows she is a monster and has worked very hard all her life to cultivate the perfect mask to hide behind. But as her desires grow more fierce and she escalates to action, her ability to maintain the mask falls away, until she’s finally discovered. Celeste’s voracious desire for fourteen year old boys is a predatory one, almost vampiric in nature, as she worships their youth and takes it for her own pleasure. She is single-minded, obsessive, and compulsively sexual.
I’m not sure exactly why the author felt the need to write this book–perhaps it was an intellectual exercise to explore the headspace a person living on the fringes of a taboo?–but for whatever reason, she did it well. I picked it up out of curiosity based on a few GR friend reviews. That curiosity was the main driving factor at the beginning and end of reading the novel, but I will admit it was hard to push through the middle of it when the experience of being in Celeste’s head, watching her ruin so many lives, and define herself almost solely through her obsession, became rather unbearable and tedious in a horrific sort of way. It was very relieving to come to the end of the book.
I’m not sorry I read this, but I will definitely never read it again. Once was enough. And depending on the subject of her next book, I may or may not pick up further books by this author.
