This week, like a lot of people, I’ve been mostly thinking about Armond and Ron Swanson Frank and Bill. If you aren’t currently watching The Last of Us then you’ll just have to trust me when I say, there is a book recommendation coming, and also perhaps you should be watching The Last of Us.
Last week’s episode of the prestige zombie (lol) series, based on a game I’ve never played on a console I’ve never owned, was widely celebrated as a significantly ‘great’ episode of Television. You know it’s important when people refer to it as Television again. It’s the Cinema of the movies.
Frank and Bill aren’t the main characters in The Last of Us, and the majority of last week’s episode was their story, which meant that our main quest (a taciturn Pedro Pascal delivers a not-scared-enough kid to someplace where she might save the world) was temporarily paused. I read a good explanation of why we should not refer to this episode as a ‘Bottle Episode’ and instead use the term ‘Departure Episode’, which makes perfect sense to me as a person who had never heard the term Bottle Episode before this week, but it seems like this was a big debate on Twitter, which is where I get all my opinions from anyway. I saw some Tweets1 asking people to name their other favourite Significantly Great Episodes and while lots of my own favourites turned out to be Bottle Episodes, some were, in fact, Departure Episodes. We live and learn.
I just want to say it plainly that I loved this episode, and I look forward to all new major TV series writing Emmy-baiting Departure Episodes in the future, which we may or may not refer to as Significantly Great Episodes of Television on Twitter one day. My theory, since you asked, is that we love television that makes us feel like we’re at the cinema, but what really sends us over the edge is when a series makes us feel like we’re reading a novel.
Now in the same way you’re already ok with me using the term Prestige TV about a zombie video-game show, you have to just be ok with my use of the term Literary Fiction; we’re calling them equivalents for the purpose of this newsletter even though both always rely on, and celebrate, Genre.
I oppose the lazy idea that Literary Fiction is an umbrella term for “books where nothing happens”2 or “people just talking”.3 I actually oppose the idea of ‘nothing happening’ overall. In anything. Something is always happening. Don’t even think about arguing with me about it.4 Something is always happening.
Audiences were very quick to champion Sally Wainwright’s character deviating from the action-plot to check what’s for tea,5 but are often ready to condemn a novel whose action-plot is what’s for tea, and as any parent of a five-year-old knows, that can make for some high-octane drama! What’s this got to do with Bill and Frank? Nothing, because while that episode was a departure from the current timeline action of The Mission, the story so far was integral to it. The world-building was so secure (thanks, Eps 1 and 2) that we could temporarily step away from the pounding elevator-pitch-perfect plot to listen to a different story and here’s where I make the death-defying jump to the book I’ve read this week. This link is so tenuous it actually died in my drafts but here I am, resurrecting it and making it weird.
Hear me out because this week I read Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery. Imagine the set-up…
The New York art scene in the zombie apocalypse. Andy Warhol is Pedro Pascal - the star; a quiet presence that makes everyone else (artistically) weak at the knees. Being close to Andy/Pedro is about survival in a city/world that wants to eat you alive, and he’s going to do anything he can to stay relevant; he’ll throw the bodies in the pit if it saves his own skin. Nick Offerman is Mae, our main character. She’s escaping on her own terms, writing her own rules for survival, and the entire novel is her departure episode in the series that you picked up because you thought you were interested in Andy Warhol.
At seventeen, Mae is already misunderstood; overlooked by an alcoholic mother and over-parented by a man who isn’t her father. Mae can’t make sense of the girls at school, ‘they knew I was pathetic, but the truth was I knew they were pathetic too.’
When a girl collapses at school, Mae admits to her only friend that she found the scene exciting, but her bad taste comment is circulated and she is immediately ostracised. Rather than return to the charade of school, Mae takes a typing job at the studio of the artist Andy Warhol.
There, she meets Shelley, and the two of them are tasked with transcribing the tapes that Andy relentlessly records. A strange friendship forms in which they’re bound by the realities of their disturbing work, and the surreal qualities of their situation. They tread gently round the shores of Andy’s artwork and parties, moving invisibly between people whose only ambition is to be seen. Mae finds herself imbued with the purpose of a mission; still carrying a sense of otherness, looking down on the light-hungry hoards she encounters, not noticing her own commitment to the completion of Andy’s book holds some similarity. What does it mean to be looked at? What does it mean to make evidence of yourself in the world? And who gets to control who is forgotten?
Mae’s story is only a moment in the art history of Andy Warhol, but moments make a life. Isn’t that how we talk about history – where were you when it happened? Isn’t that the way we still talk about huge historic events? How we watched it on the news? How we suddenly spoke to a stranger? Where is the line between being part of something and being someone who simply watched it happen?
I love the questions Nicole Flattery’s novel asks through Mae’s brush with the man, the myth, the moment that was Andy Warhol, not knowing of the legacy his work would produce. How recognisable he’d become despite lurking in the shadows, turning the camera and the recorders on everyone but himself.
Nothing Special is a book I admire deeply because of its refusal to centre the celebrity and its scope for imagination. It’s true that there were two high school girls hired to type the manuscript and that because of one of them, a tape was destroyed. Their existence is proved in the book that is still in print today, but here is a novel that gives them a story. The people on the outskirts, quietly making things happen, when we thought they were just living.
Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery is published by Bloombsury next month and you can pre-order a copy from my independent bookshop here
name of my memoir
I probably said this
I’ve definitely said this and it’s my favourite
even on Twitter
Me, I champion it too, I love it.
Excellent, excellent. I love reading your posts.
Just when I think I’ve regained emotional control of myself after watching this… love this piece, tenuous link included. Perhaps a full list of ‘If you liked The Last of Us try this tenuously linked book…’ at the end of the series - you could be onto something!