NOVEMBER 2017 - AudioFile
Narrator Suzanne Elise Freeman pulls listeners into this crude yet hilarious romp in a dysfunctional dystopian world of the near future. The ribald dialogue of the main character, Hazel, is augmented by an even smuttier cast of crazies. Freeman gives the voice of Hazel’s dying father a raspy dirty-old-man quality that fits a man who insists on having not one, but two, inflatable sex dolls. Hazel’s befuddled voice recounts events that run the gamut from her repressed less-than-idyllic childhood memories to her present-day reality. Freeman smoothly transitions listeners to the questionable subplot involving the cross-species sexual attraction of narcissistic Jaspar to a dolphin. Who knew?? One can’t not laugh, yet there’s much to contemplate in the undercurrent of hopelessness and fear in Freeman’s different vocalizations. A.M.G. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
04/17/2017
As she did in Tampa, her first novel about an eighth-grade teacher’s affair with a student, Nutting deftly exploits the comic potential of perverse attachments, here to sex dolls, aquatic mammals, and technological devices. Readers of Dave Eggers’s The Circle will be familiar with Nutting’s caricature of an ominous and ubiquitous technology giant, Gogol Industries, though this cautionary tale packs the profane punch of satirists like Carl Hiaasen. The story begins after a woman, Hazel, has fled her controlling husband, Byron, a cold-blooded, germaphobic, and distinctly un-Byronic tech titan who “treated his electronics like lesser wives.” Hazel takes refuge in her father’s trailer park home, vastly different from her former lodging, “the Hub,” Byron’s sterile compound that is at once a prison, spa, and hospital. Living with her father and his recently purchased sex doll, Hazel hopes to avoid Byron’s near-omniscient gaze and forge a new, unsurveilled, and thrillingly unhygienic life. Elsewhere Jasper, a handsome hustler whose two great joys are “sex and conning people out of money,” has a bizarre encounter with a dolphin, kindling in him an unquenchable cross-species desire. Though Jasper’s zany plot strand eventually ties into Hazel’s story and touches on relevant themes of anonymity and objectification, it never fully works. Nonetheless, the novel charms in its witty portrait of a woman desperate to reconnect with her humanity. (July)
The Fanzine
“Made for Love is an argument for that wilder life, as dirty and maniacal as it may be, as well as a plea: interrogate functionality, accept the risk in letting humans exist: not as machines or robots or fantasies, but as they desire to be.
Booklist
A sly satire of our tech- and prosperity-obsessed society.
Dan Chaon
Alissa Nutting is one of the most daring writers in America. She has the courage and recklessness to look our crazy culture in the eye, laughing as the headlights bear down upon her. This book is hilarious, and deeply sad, and hilarious.
Lynda Barry
Oh god I just love every page. It’s fantastic.
Roxane Gay
There is no one who negotiates the absurd as vigorously yet poignantly as Nutting. In her second novel…there are sex dolls and a senior citizen trailer park and brain chips and a con man who loves dolphins and still, the story makes sense like a motherfucker. Brilliant, dense, hilarious writing.
Jami Attenberg
Alissa Nutting’s Made for Love is bizarre and vivid and unexpected and wickedly funny. I promise you will enjoy the ride.
Garth Greenwell
So blisteringly smart and feverishly inventive that it’s difficult to decide which element pins most precisely the absurdity of our present or the terror of our future. This is a novel as frightening as it is hilarious, melding pathos, comedy, and delight as only great satire can.
The Rumpus.com
Hilarious...Nutting’s smart, ribald, and hugely entertaining new novel provokes many chuckles. Occasionally, she reaches higher, and grants the reader flashes of something truly great: a striking view of the pathetic, that Gogolian, absurdist sublime.
Refinery 29
This is the raunchy, absurd, intelligent romp you’ve been looking for.
Nylon Magazine
Nutting’s uniquely hilarious voice is the perfect guide to this darkly surreal, extremely relatable universe, in which the absurd becomes expected and our own personal hells feel like they’ve been perversely rendered in neon, airbrushed paint.
VICE
Easily one of the funniest books about sex and modern technology you’ll read this year.
San Diego Magazine
Alissa Nutting has written the most hilarious and downright bananas book of the summer
“11 Books You Won’t Be Able to Put Dow Cosmopolitan
As absurd and hilarious as it is poignant.
The Millions
Nutting is the perfect writer to examine this absurdity, and what she’s done in Made for Love is remarkable. Let’s just put it out there: go read this book.
Buzzfeed
Made for Love will be one of the funniest, most absurd books you’ll read this summer....Hilarious, clever, and strikingly original, Made for Love speaks to the absurdity of our societal obsessions with technology and wealth.
NPR.org
Easily one of the funniest books about sex and modern technology you’ll read this year.
Cosmopolitan
Embrace the absurdity in this bonkers romp.
New York Daily News
[A] wacky, hysterical and crazy-compelling story. Virtually every sentence of this book is laugh-out-loud hilarious... With [Nutting’s] wit plus the intrigue of the plot, it really is impossible to put down.
LitHub
Alissa Nutting’s Made for Love has to be this summer’s most heartwarming novel.
W Magazine
Provocative and irreverent, Made for Love is an absurdly hilarious musing on love and marriage.
Harper's Bazaar
Bizarre and brutally funny… relentlessly entertaining… Made for Love is a whip-smart critique of our relationship with technology and the ways we connect to other humans.
The New Yorker
[Hazel] is the rare literary heroine in whose company it would be a pleasure to absolutely wreck my life...The book is a total joyride, dizzying and surprising, like a state-fair roller coaster that makes you queasy for a moment but leaves you euphoric in the end.
New York Times Book Review
Smart, riveting ... The book begins, and races along, as an antic thriller...Made for Love crackles and satisfies by all its own weird rules, subversively inventing delight where none should exist. How can a book be so bright, and so dark?
NOVEMBER 2017 - AudioFile
Narrator Suzanne Elise Freeman pulls listeners into this crude yet hilarious romp in a dysfunctional dystopian world of the near future. The ribald dialogue of the main character, Hazel, is augmented by an even smuttier cast of crazies. Freeman gives the voice of Hazel’s dying father a raspy dirty-old-man quality that fits a man who insists on having not one, but two, inflatable sex dolls. Hazel’s befuddled voice recounts events that run the gamut from her repressed less-than-idyllic childhood memories to her present-day reality. Freeman smoothly transitions listeners to the questionable subplot involving the cross-species sexual attraction of narcissistic Jaspar to a dolphin. Who knew?? One can’t not laugh, yet there’s much to contemplate in the undercurrent of hopelessness and fear in Freeman’s different vocalizations. A.M.G. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2017-04-18
A glimpse into the future—which looks a lot like the present—from the author of Tampa (2013) and Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls (2011)."Hazel's 76-year-old father had bought a doll. A life-size woman doll. The kind designed to provide a sexual experience that came as close as possible to having sex with a living (or maybe, Hazel thought, a more apt analogy was a very-very-recently deceased) female." These are the first lines of Nutting's second novel (her first book was a collection of short fiction). They are attention-getting, certainly, and the mix of barefaced candor and mordant humor will be familiar to the author's fans, as will the deeply flawed protagonist. Hazel was well on her way to becoming a standard-issue screw-up when she met tech billionaire Byron Gogol. When the story begins, she's trying to escape her marriage to Byron—and hoping to avoid being assassinated by her obsessive spouse. Much of the novel is set in 2019, after Hazel has left her husband, but there are flashbacks to her courtship—if we can call it that—and life in Byron's compound. There's also a parallel story about Jasper, a con artist who develops a sexual and romantic attachment to dolphins after a male bottlenose tries to rape him. Nutting's prose style is distinctive, and the narrative is shot through with her inventive language, and she's adept at creating darkly absurd situations. But character-building is not among her strengths. Hazel never quite emerges as a fully formed person, which makes it hard to remain interested in her. The same goes for Jasper. And this novel's pacing is uneven and, ultimately, unsatisfying. While Nutting borrows plot elements from thrillers, narrative momentum is constantly undercut by back story and scenes that are odd and amusing but not entirely necessary. An uneven effort from a terrific writer.
