I saw Alissa Nutting read from Made for Love at Brooklyn Bridge Park over the summer: the scene she read is a hilarious bit where the protagonist, Hazel, who has moved in with her septuagenarian father after leaving her evil-tech-genius-billionaire husband, gets her arm stuck in the mouth of her dad’s new purchase, a highly realistic sex doll. It’s a laugh-out-loud funny bit, and also maybe one of the less weird things in the book. Made for Love follows Hazel and her predicament—she left her husband, Byron, because he wanted to put a chip in her brain so their minds could connect; she fears he’ll stop at nothing to try to get her back, and also fears that if he realizes she’s not coming back, he’ll just have her killed. It’s not just about Hazel, though: we also meet Jasper, a con-man who pretends he’s in love with women, convinces them to give him large sums of money, then skips town. He has a predicament of his own, which is complicated but involves a bizarre experience with a dolphin. There’s also a whole bunch of satire about imagined near-future technology, and a whole lot of very funny/over-the-top scenes, including a great bit where Hazel, very drunk, steals a plastic lawn flamingo and ends up snuggling with it in bed.
It was interesting to read this book after having read Connie Willis’s Crosstalk, which has some similar plot points and explores some of the same themes: they’re both about the threats of technological over-connectedness, and they both explore selfhood and agency and authenticity and the dangers of losing oneself in something that seems like love but isn’t at all. I think both books succeed at what they’re trying to do: I found Crosstalk fast-paced and impossible to put down, and Made for Love less immediately gripping but ultimately more subtle and thought-provoking than I was expecting.
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