![]() ![]() He challenges her decision with wildly insensitive questions and exclamations like “Do you know how much money Byron has?” and “I don’t see any bruises on you!” He then encourages her to lower her standards for happiness, particularly considering a tough economy in which, he warns, she is “too old to compete with ‘intern cute.’”īut her father’s incredulity at Hazel’s leaving her marriage is only one facet of his reluctance to let her move in. Her father is delighted to see her, but stunned when she announces she has voluntarily exited the elite orbit of her billionaire spouse. In the opening pages of the book, Hazel has left Byron and his sterile, stultifying “futureworld”-he wanted to “mild meld” with her by implanting a chip in her brain-and has decamped to her father’s house, a unit in a senior citizen’s trailer park, where she is not altogether welcome. (Sure, it also sounds like Google, but it’s Gogol, and certainly not an accident.) Hazel Green, the protagonist of Made for Love, Alissa Nutting’s hilarious, madcap second novel, lives in the absurd world of Gogol Industries, a ubiquitous, privacy-shattering tech behemoth run by Byron Gogol, her husband. You cannot place a man in an absurd situation if the whole world he lives in is absurd.” ![]() It would be wrong to assert that Gogol placed his characters in absurd situations. “In Gogol’s case,” he continued, “it borders upon the latter. “The absurd has as many shades and degrees as the tragic has,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov about Nikolai Gogol in his idiosyncratic 1944 biography of the writer. ![]()
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