Animal (novel by Lisa Taddeo)

ANIMAL

By Lisa Taddeo

“If someone asked me to describe myself in a single word, depraved is the one I would use.” So says Joan, the barely hinged, 30-something narrator of “Animal,” the propulsive, fiercely confident debut novel by Lisa Taddeo. Voracious and obsessive, Joan is addicted to love and its analogues — in particular, the adoration of men who happen to be married to someone else.

The novel opens with an actual bang: Joan’s married boss, with whom she’s had a protracted affair, bursts into a restaurant where she’s having dinner with another man and shoots himself in front of her. (No spoilers here: It literally happens in the first paragraph.) The dead man is Vic, the avuncular creative director of the Manhattan ad agency where Joan works, a besotted sugar daddy who mentored, promoted, bedded, spoiled and stalked her. The memory of their affair hangs like Spanish moss over the first half of the book.

“I can tell you a lot about sex with a man to whom you are not attracted,” Joan says. “It becomes all about your own performance, your own body and how it looks on the outside, the way it moves above this man who, for you, is only a spectator.”

[ Read an excerpt from “Animal.” ]

She found the affair expedient. “At a certain point, I began to rely on Vic for everything,” she admits. “At first I enjoyed all the praise and then I started to feel like I deserved everything I got, that he had nothing to do with it.”

After Vic’s death, Joan sets off on a cross-country road trip, pausing briefly for a one-night stand with a traveling salesman she meets in Texas, whom she seduces simply because his name is John Ford. “Along the drive I had been wanting to sleep with a real cowboy, someone without social media,” she explains.

Her journey ends in Southern California, where she rents a house overlooking Topanga Canyon. Joan, a quintessential New Yorker, is comically immune to its charms. “There were lots of horses in the canyon,” she observes wryly. “Women with long braids rode them over rocks.”

In Los Angeles her days are filled with ruminating and shoplifting. She gets a job as a barista and meets a variety of men who want to sleep with her, including Lenny, her senile landlord, and River, a 22-year-old dropout who lives in a yurt. She pops pills and answers text messages from Vic’s angry widow, and goes out of her way to befriend a woman named Alice — a celebrity yoga instructor she spotted on a magazine cover back in New York, “one of those aspirational magazines for people who make more than five million dollars a year.”

This, it turns out, is the entire reason for Joan’s West Coast odyssey: Unbeknown to Alice, she is Joan’s half sister, the product of their father’s extramarital affair. Their growing friendship prompts a reckoning, and a shocking revelation about Joan’s past.

“Women had never loved me,” Joan reflects. To her great credit, Taddeo resists the pressure — rampant these days — to craft a likable, “relatable” female narrator. In “Animal” she gleefully does the opposite. Joan takes a perverse pleasure in exposing the ugliest parts of herself. Her worldview is primal, opportunistic, hypersexualized: All men are sexual prospects and all women are rivals, even her new bestie Alice. “She wore no makeup and I wanted to kill her,” Joan recalls. “But first I wanted to put her in a cage, fatten her up, feed her hormones and pig cheeks and Fanta. Knock her teeth out and shave her eyebrows. I wanted her to die ugly.”

Taddeo can write a killer sentence. “High school … was a blur of bad grades, stupid bangs and cigarettes.” On men and their dogs: “They will bring them everywhere and never forsake them. Unlike their women, their children. Dogs want nothing of a man except all the things a man wants to give.” She’s at her best when exploring the murky, sometimes twisted relations between men and women. “Almost always in my life there had been one man I desired who was giving me nothing at the same time as there was another who didn’t move me but from whom I was taking very much,” Joan says.

“Animal” is a story about trauma, how the psychic wounds of childhood draw the blueprint for a lifetime of emotional carnage and, eventually, physical violence. In the course of the novel, Joan suffers, commits or bears witness to rapes, child molestation, suicide and murder. In the midst of the financial crisis of 2008, a Wall Street trader pays her a thousand dollars to kick him in the testicles. There’s also a forced abortion, a pregnancy test taken at gunpoint and a stunningly graphic miscarriage that leaves the expectant mother covered in blood and holding the fetus in her hand.

If all this sounds far-fetched, it is. Taddeo isn’t a subtle writer. But what she lacks in nuance, she makes up for in bravado, psychological acuity and sly wit. Joan’s voice is so sharp and magnetic that the reader will follow her anywhere — even to the dark and increasingly unbelievable depths her creator sends her.

The world of “Animal” is relentlessly bleak. If its particulars don’t always make sense (Joan is a high school graduate who reads Derrida and somehow has a high-powered career in New York advertising), its values at least remain consistent. Every husband cheats, and every adultery results in mortal injury or death. Little girls are warped by a culture that views them as sexual objects almost from birth. Joan remembers of a family friend: “His Zippo had a pinup girl on it. Long brown hair with bangs and a pink bikini. My youth was marked by such images — seeing them on playing cards or drawn crudely on bathroom stalls.”

Writing a novel is a shell game — an elaborate con in which the author aims to dazzle with what she does well, in hopes of distracting the reader from what she can’t do at all. Taddeo’s prose glitters. She has a gift for aphorism, the observation that astonishes. She is less successful at imagining the shape of a life. As the story unfolds, Joan’s depravity has a numbing effect, and the unremitting degeneracy of the male characters begins to seem didactic. The intention seems less to shine a light on human nature than to cast it in funhouse shapes.

In researching her nonfiction debut, “Three Women,” Taddeo spent eight years getting to know her eponymous subjects. Novelistic in scope, the book laid bare the most intimate moments of its subjects’ lives, animated by Taddeo’s empathy and intelligence and remarkable insight. The same formidable gifts are on display here. Taddeo is writing with all her stars out, though they shone a little brighter when life itself supplied the plot.

Jennifer Haigh’s novels include “Mrs. Kimble” and “Heat and Light.” Her sixth, “Mercy Street,” will be published next February.

ANIMAL

By Lisa Taddeo

336 pp. Avid Reader Press. $27.99