Smart humour … Cassandra Neyenesch. Photograph: PR
A Little Bit Bad by Cassandra Neyenesch review – a sparkling, subversive debut. With its echoes of Miranda July’s All Fours, this tragicomic tale of an American woman’s illicit romance is also a gripping murder mystery.
The plot of A Little Bit Bad sounds like the setup for a joke: “Like, this white lady lusting after her hot Chicano roofer?” Perdita Jungfrau, the narrator, is describing her own situation. “Yuck.”
It’s 2009 and Perdita is 39 when she meets 25-year-old Nando, who is working on next door’s roof. “Burned out” after a decade as a hospital social worker, she’s a stay-at-home mother to a toddler, and pregnant again (though she doesn’t know it yet). She isn’t happy. Her husband is critical of her for quitting her job, and won’t look after the children: “Babies scare me!” Perdita is out in her San Diego backyard on the day that Nando falls from a ladder propped up against the neighbour’s house. She sees it happen, calls an ambulance and sits beside him on the grass to wait.
“You know when someone is either handsome or wild-looking, and you don’t know which it is?” Nando’s face is freckled, with two little bumps where his nose has been broken twice. He describes himself as an “anarcho-Marxist” and is “opinionated in a calm, deadpan way”. He reads The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon on his lunch break, but has “somehow missed out” on college and is struggling to make a living in the post-crash economy.
Perdita and Nando should make an odd couple, but they don’t. They’re both raw and fragile, and they share a sense of delight in the abyss. (When Perdita’s son bites the face of another child at toddler group, Nando totally gets it: “He just likes the taste of human flesh”.) Their attraction feels real – there’s a sense of something tense and secret between them when they’re alone. When their differences come between them, that also feels realistic.
A Little Bit Bad is the debut novel from New Yorker Neyenesch. It’s released in the wake of Miranda July’s very successful All Fours, another story of a middle-aged California wife who discovers an intense desire for a younger man, and absconds. Where July’s novel concentrates on the “unleashed life” of the perimenopausal woman, Neyenesch’s takes a different turn. A second plot strand, set one year on in 2010, runs in parallel to the story of the affair. Nando has been murdered, and Perdita is trying to solve the case (she’s devastated, and also a fan of true crime).
Like All Fours, A Little Bit Bad has a careering plotline, flying between the everyday drudgery of mom-life, and a heightened, surreal or imagistic mode. My favourite character is an owl with the face of a woman who appears occasionally to Perdita and addresses her in the voice of the man who works at the local pawn shop. Beyond or via their fictional flights of fancy, All Fours is concerned with the politics of biology and the “true self” of a woman in midlife, whereas A Little Bit Bad is more interested in societal injustice. The military-industrial complex, the “good Obamaverse” and the carceral system all feature. At its sharpest, the novel poses questions about the structural violence of a culture that privileges the normative nuclear family. To some extent, it pulls back from a focus on the middle-class mother to ask who really feels that violence.
It’s also very funny. I was reminded of the heroines of Halle Butler’s novels – Perdita could be their older sister, another ferocious dork with a genius for behaving inappropriately. (Of course her son bites faces.) Neyenesch’s comic excellence and sharp insight occasionally come at the cost of blunter things, such as emotion. When Nando falls off the ladder and lies on the ground between life and death, Perdita, kneeling beside him, sees the blood coming out of him as “exit-sign red”. There’s something here that could be felt by the reader as serious, but the narrative chooses a smart humour, and those feelings never get too close.
There were points at which I wondered whether Neyenesch was deliberately satirising All Fours, or more broadly the trend for frantic fictional celebrations of older women going rogue. Certainly, she is having a laugh with California-flavoured ideas about self-expression. One chapter is wonderfully titled “The Roofer Holds Space for My Feelings”.
At heart, this story is tragic. The touch of satire pulls it back from the abyss, and it’s probably for the best. I absolutely enjoyed every single page. The plot is constructed for compulsive reading: the two storylines are told in interspersed chapters, and as the affair begins to cool, the murder mystery gets going. The central couple are sparkling and adorable. At an open-mic night on their first date they get up on stage. Perdita raps, while Nando, at her side, does “an Irish clog dance”. The audience is delighted. A Little Bit Bad by Cassandra Neyenesch is published by Fig Tree (£16.99). To order your copy, go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
