Tampa: A Novel

Loosely based on true events, Tampa is the fictional account of Celeste Price, a beautiful young8th grade teacher sexually obsessed with adolescent boys. Fourteen is her target age, before they start turning into men.

Celeste has an empty marriage to a cop named Ford, who’s almost too handsome himself. She can barely stand the thought of him touching her and has to drug herself to have sex with him. Sometimes she drugs him to avoid sex. The book is all about sex, is sexually charged throughout, and the language reflects this. A student’s raincoat is “A hideous color, like the erection of a dog.” The voice is Celeste’s and it is confident, true and pitch perfect throughout the story.

Celeste is a narcissist with an extraordinary show more ability to ignore the wrongness and consequences of her actions. The only time Celeste doesn’t seem to be dissembling is when she admits to not wanting children because if she had a boy she would eventually be tempted by him. And when she tells the baffled Ford – after all has been revealed – “It’s just what I like.” She is unrepentant until the last word of the novel. Celeste’s obsession is who she is. show less

"... thirty-one is roughly seventeen years past my window of sexual interest." (p.1). Thus, Celeste describes her husband, and thus, right from the start she makes clear what she wants. Celeste is a female, predatory pedophile.

Sadly, repeated sex scandals over the past three decades have numbed readers, and although sexual assault on children by pedophiles still evokes horror, Tampa, by Alissa Nutting is much more a parody than a shocking novel.

The inversion, of making the pedophile in Tampa a female character highlights the groteskness of the idea. Pedophilia is grotesk of itself, and Alissa Nutting uses hyperbole to magnify the problem: the disproportionate, excessive weirdness of Celeste Price is almost humoristic.

Celeste Price is show more married to the over-averagely handsome Ford. Aged 26, she works as a high school teacher. She is smart, direct and predatory. The novel is written from her perspective, so the reader follows her ridiculous reasoning in line. Celeste's mind is like a parallel universe. Her predatory, rational acting comes natural to her. Her sexual drive toward young adolescents is complete and hard-core. The novel shuns no taboos. Celeste strives for complete sexual relationships including penetration.

Tampa makes the most of its theme, driving Celeste to ever more precarious escapades. Nothing is crazy enough. If she cannot have a boy, she masturbates. She focuses on pupils in her own classes, whom she first approaches after class. If successful, she tries to develop complete sexual relationships with the boys in their homes. Caught, almost in flagrante with Jack's father, she seamlessly proceeds to seduce the father, merely to cover up what has been going on with the son. When Jack's father dies of a heart attack, she takes it in her stride. When boys pass on, or become "too old" she swoops down onto other boys.

Most if not all pedosexual scandals in the real world involve men predating on either young boys or girls. A female sexual predator and sociopath such as Celeste Price in Tampa, do they exist? The psyche of Celeste is a clever construct, whether 'realistic' or not. Nutting does a better job with Celeste's young victims. The psychology of the boys in the novel is quite convincing. Not entirely plausible, though, Tampa has the bravoura of the novels of John Irving, while Celeste has the obsessed mindset of a female American Psycho.

Like the novels of John Irving, ridiculous and balancing on the edge of credibility, Tampa by Alissa Nutting is very well written. However, as the novel is very explicit about sexuality, it is clearly not for everyone. Besides, its taboo theme, however close it may come to parody, is probably not acceptable to all readers. show less

This novel left me feeling icky. And seeing as how it's about a 26-year-old 8th grade teacher who seduces 14 year old boys, it did its job.

Celeste Price is a gorgeous woman with a disturbing sexual appetite, one that only underage boys can satisfy. She is repulsed by her husband Ford, and often drugs herself (or him) when intimate encounters with him inevitably occur. She talks constantly about how disgusting other people (particularly adult women) are, and is self-centered in the most horrible way. Her main, and only, goal is to find a perfect specimen of a boy; in fact, she got her teaching credential just so she can constantly be around them. When she finally selects Jack Patrick as her target, she does everything in her power to show more keep him (but only for a year or so - after that, they start getting too mature).

Nutting based her story on Debra Lafave, a young teacher who was accused of sleeping with her underage students, and a high school classmate of Nutting. During the trial, the jury was told that she was "too beautiful for prison", a sentiment echoed near the end of the book when Celeste inevitably gets found out.

Nutting combines erotica and social satire/criticism in an interesting way. Celeste is absolutely unrepentant in her monstrosity, and her calculating and borderline sociopathic behavior sheds a light on female predators. While the writing was good enough, there was still something about the book that didn't connect for me. I can't quite put my finger on it.

Obviously, this book depicts events and acts that are not for the squeamish. It's not fun or easy to read about child sexual abuse, but in the hands of Nutting, the topic could be an eye-opener into how the world sees female sexual predators and their victims. show less

Let me just start out by saying that Alissa Nutting doesn't care if you're uncomfortable. There's not a page of this novel that doesn't make somebody unhappy. Celeste Price is a twenty-six year old middle school English teacher. She's also a pedophile, relentlessly fantasizing about boys and then using her position to prey on them. Like Humbert Humbert, she's full of rationalizations about her behavior; unlike him, she's devoid of the cultural wrappings that served to make what he did palatable. She's perfectly aware of the potentially devastating consequences to herself if she is unmasked and utterly unconcerned about the effects on the boys she manipulates.

Tampa is told from Celeste's point of view. It's an unpleasant place to be. show more She's a consummate manipulator of everyone from her victims to her husband to her co-workers. She knows how to use her youth and beauty to distract people. She's also deeply insecure as her ability to lure victims is entirely based on her youth and beauty.

Nutting is doing some interesting work here. She's written a compelling, compulsively readable novel about something terrible. She makes the reader look at what Celeste is doing and the excuses she makes, even as she confronts the reader with how differently we would regard the same narrative from a middle-aged man. show less

Not for the squeamish or easily offended, but a powerful, noir-ish, graphic, first-person account of the crimes of a female sexual predator which chillingly follows the thoughts of an amoral obsessive personality while exposing the double standards of the culture around child molestation. Had a James Cain/Jim Thompson feel...definitely in the crime novel category (as Megan Abbott points out in her review).

In which an unhappily married ephebeomaniac begins her career teaching junior high by evaluating the boys for a subject with her most desired characteristics to gratify her sensual passions and makes a successful approach to him. In many ways this is a difficult and flawed book; long sections of its prose reside in a grey area between a romance novel and quasi-pornography, and I defy anybody to identify a single character in it who is the least bit likable. Yet this trainwreck is difficult to look away from; the characters are well-drawn and the plot thickens beautifully. The easy comparison of this as a sort of reverse Lolita is incomplete and flawed in at least one major way; Humbert Humbert is a fool, and our narrator is no fool. show more Though not exactly likable, her frankness and quickness in anticipating tactics and scenarios is intriguing. And I especially liked that the novel didn't end up as a morality tale. show less

She is appalling. She's hilarious. She's a deviant. She's every school boys fantasy come to life. I swung between laughing out loud at this novel and then going ewwwww and feeling guilty for laughing because the subject matter is decidedly unpleasant. Certainly made me think though.