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 at