Nothing Is Terrible
A Novel
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Matthew Sharpe's debut collection, Stories from the Tube, was praised in the Los Angeles Times Book Review for its "wildly effective-and often touching-collisions of the banal and the surreal." Wiredcalled it "unsettling, lovely, creepy"; Forbes FYI heralded it as a "remarkable fiction debut." In Nothing Is Terrible, his first novel, Sharpe astonishes once again with the hallucinatory and hilarious story of a girl's unusual coming-of-age and her search for love in unlikely places.
Her name is Mary White, though she prefers to be called Paul, the name of her ill-fated twin brother. Bright, pragmatic, irreverent, and orphaned, she is being raised by her clueless aunt and uncle and fears she may be about to drown in dull suburban torpor-until she falls in love with her new sixth-grade teacher, Miss Skip Hartman. Devoted teacher and pupil run off to live in New York City, where Mary receives a very unconventional education (art dealers, drug dealers, boyfriends, epic piercings) and discovers redemptive power in even the most unorthodox kind of love, all of which she relates in the most Brontëan gentle-reader tone.
In Nothing Is Terrible, Matthew Sharpe takes the bildungsroman and turns it upside down and inside out. Like a breakneck sprint through a Manhattan house of mirrors, it offers readers a giddily literate tour of the resourceful mind of a singular young woman.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Grotesquely comic and resolutely strange, short story writer and journalist Sharpe's first novel involves an androgynous, precocious girl named Mary White, who accidentally causes her twin brother Paul's death and is redeemed in love by her blonde and beautiful sixth-grade teacher. Upon the death of their parents in a car accident, 10-year-old Mary and her brother are left in the care of their mean-tempered uncle and simple, silent aunt. Sickly Paul is the philosopher and Mary the energetic implementer of his ideas. After Mary stirs up a bees' nest and Paul dies from their stings, she is left to fend for herself in the suburban school system. She develops what she calls her "ongoing involvement with myself," becoming a small-scale tyrant and musing often on her fate. As she herself remarks to the "dear reader" in Charlotte Brontean fashion: "This Mary character is not very nice." Smitten with the difficult 11-year-old, Teacher of the Year Miss "Skip" Hartman seduces her and literally buys her from her aunt and uncle. Whisked away to Skip's Upper East Side apartment, Mary is schooled in Shakespeare, algebra and the arts of love. But becoming restless, she takes up with a coterie of aimless drug pushers and her second lover, an environmentally sensitive Central Park squatter and ex-classmate named Mittler. Through characters such as Paul and early moments of rare sincerity, Sharpe proves that he can write affectingly. However, he condescends to the reader like an uneasy comedian afraid to bore the audience, relying heavily on his deadpan delivery of grotesque detail. His Mary--unsympathetic, smug and, worst of all for a fictional character, not memorable--is no Jane Eyre.
