I’ve been wanting to read Tampa since it came out. Now the book is nearly as old as the teacher’s victims, and had me yelling “What the fuck” with every turn of the page.
In Alissa Nutting’s novel Tampa, Celeste Price, a smoldering 26-year-old middle-school teacher in Florida, unrepentantly recounts her elaborate and sociopathically determined seduction of a 14-year-old student.
Celeste has chosen and lured the charmingly modest Jack Patrick into her web. Jack is enthralled and in awe of his eighth-grade teacher, and, most importantly, willing to accept Celeste’s terms for a secret relationship—car rides after dark, rendezvous at Jack’s house while his single father works the late shift, and body-slamming erotic encounters in Celeste’s empty classroom. In slaking her sexual thirst, Celeste Price is remorseless and deviously free of hesitation, a monstress of pure motivation. She deceives everyone, is close to no one, and cares little for anything but her pleasure.
Tampa is a sexually explicit, virtuosically satirical, American Psycho–esque rendering of a monstrously misplaced but undeterrable desire. Laced with black humor and crackling sexualized prose, Alissa Nutting’s Tampa is a grand, seriocomic examination of the want behind student / teacher affairs and a scorching literary debut.
Frank in its depiction of an entirely heartless and cruel sociopath, the writing is blunt and open, though that is not to suggest there’s an ounce of honesty anywhere to be found. Honesty requires self reflection, which Celeste has no interest in.
She takes no responsibility for herself or her actions, and feels no ethical or moral compulsion to change.
It’s a character archetype often regulated to men, and the changing power dynamics of the perpetrator being an attractive, wealthy woman was an interesting one. She wields this power with finesse, choosing her victims as being those most likely to keep her secret. Isolated boys without strong friendships or reliable family bonds.
She offers no humanity to any other character. There’s an overall transactional relationship that overwrites all else. People are not whole; they are at best, a means to an end, or otherwise an obstacle.
There’s a resentment of her own needs: not because she thinks they’re wrong, but because it relies on other people to fulfill them.
Even the boys she abuses become, in their own way, an obstacle. Their humanity, their autonomy, is an annoyance that has to be tolerated. She dehumanizes and uses them with a total lack of concern or care for their wellbeing, idly musing that it would be better if they died after mating with her.
She accepted her desires as an immutable, impermeable, if not inconvenient, fact. To ask her to try to take action to address or contain them was unthinkable. Her sexual desires were base, and served no greater function than orgasm. Her fantasies were vague desires for physical forms, an obsession with secretions and body parts, divorced from the whole. It reminded me, in a way, of The Piano Teacher, and this intense craving for physical contact that crossed the boundary into impossibility.
Her only fears were in losing access to a steady stream of victims.
While this entire book is shocking, it did not feel as though it were written with only the desire to shock. It was a cohesive character study into a completely terrible woman, and was pitiless in the lack of reflection or awareness Celeste displayed. It was refreshing in how unchanging the character was. She deserved no sympathy or compassion, and was offered none. There were no excuses, no grander design that she was simply powerless against.
It feels only apt to end this review with a quote from American Psycho. “My punishment continues to elude me and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself; no new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.”
I can’t recall ever having read a story from the perspective of a more psychopathic and self-serving character. Celeste is stunningly beautiful, with a morally indefensible desire that her only concern with is indulging without being caught. And the victims in her wake are only inconveniences at best.
As a childhood sexual assault survivor, I can definitely say seeing the inner thoughts of such a character can be quite jarring. It reminds me of how many years I spent wondering at how such awful people justify the things they do. A good reminder that: some don’t feel the need to justify them at all. You were never more than a prop, a play thing. You don’t justify yourself to objects.
The story became quite the page turner, I was left wondering what the hell she was going to do, say or think next to the very end. I have to applaud the author in their audacity in pulling something like this off. It’s unflinching, unashamed, and absolutely sick, in keeping with the truth of the character.