…smart, riveting…[Hazel's] aphoristic, hyperanalytical, deftly extemporaneous takes on love, intention, sex, childhood and gadgets are a pleasure to read and always hit their mark; they are also the interesting and entirely believable productions of a character whose self-awareness far outstrips her self-determination…Like the best episodes of Black Mirror, Made for Love provokes the disturbing realization that we are, more or less, already living in the time portrayed as a couple of steps beyond too much…If a novel's mandate is to bottle and exhibit the zeitgeist through character in a way that is, well, novel, Nutting…goes for it, all out, à la David Foster Wallace, and romanticizes nothing…not marriage, not love, not family, not sex, especially not technologyand definitely not finding one's way in the world, since many people, she realizes, don't. Hazel is rudderless, ordinary, passive; all the more impressive, then, is Nutting's creation of a compelling, wholly sympathetic character from such a beige moral blob…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?
The New York Times Book Review - Merritt Tierce
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)
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?” — New York Times Book Review
“[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.” — The New Yorker
“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.” — Harper's Bazaar
“Provocative and irreverent, Made for Love is an absurdly hilarious musing on love and marriage.” — W Magazine
“Alissa Nutting’s Made for Love has to be this summer’s most heartwarming novel.” — LitHub
“[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.” — New York Daily News
“Embrace the absurdity in this bonkers romp.” — Cosmopolitan
“Easily one of the funniest books about sex and modern technology you’ll read this year.” — NPR.org
“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.” — Buzzfeed
“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.” — The Millions
“As absurd and hilarious as it is poignant.” — Cosmopolitan, “11 Books You Won’t Be Able to Put Down This Summer”
“Alissa Nutting has written the most hilarious and downright bananas book of the summer” — San Diego Magazine
“Easily one of the funniest books about sex and modern technology you’ll read this year.” — VICE
“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.” — Nylon Magazine
“This is the raunchy, absurd, intelligent romp you’ve been looking for.” — Refinery 29
“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.” — The Rumpus.com
“Nutting deftly exploits the comic potential of perverse attachments... The novel charms in its witty portrait of a woman desperate to reconnect with her humanity.” — Publishers Weekly, ’Best Summer Books of 2017’
“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.” — Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You
“Alissa Nutting’s Made for Love is bizarre and vivid and unexpected and wickedly funny. I promise you will enjoy the ride.” — Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins
“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.” — Roxane Gay
“Oh god I just love every page. It’s fantastic.” — Lynda Barry, author of One! Hundred! Demons! and The Good Times Are Killing Me
“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.” — Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will
“A sly satire of our tech- and prosperity-obsessed society.” — Booklist
“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.” — The Fanzine
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?
New York Times Book Review
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.
Alissa Nutting’s Made for Love has to be this summer’s most heartwarming novel.
[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.
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.
Embrace the absurdity in this bonkers romp.
[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.
Easily one of the funniest books about sex and modern technology you’ll read this year.
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.
Provocative and irreverent, Made for Love is an absurdly hilarious musing on love and marriage.
[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.
“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.
Easily one of the funniest books about sex and modern technology you’ll read this year.
Alissa Nutting has written the most hilarious and downright bananas book of the summer
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.
A sly satire of our tech- and prosperity-obsessed society.
As absurd and hilarious as it is poignant.
“11 Books You Won’t Be Able to Put Dow Cosmopolitan
This is the raunchy, absurd, intelligent romp you’ve been looking for.
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.
Alissa Nutting’s Made for Love is bizarre and vivid and unexpected and wickedly funny. I promise you will enjoy the ride.
Oh god I just love every page. It’s fantastic.
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.
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.
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.
A sly satire of our tech- and prosperity-obsessed society.
Embrace the absurdity in this bonkers romp.
[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.
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
NOVEMBER 2017 - AudioFile