Novelist Stephanie LaCava has never been one for mincing words, her prose is stark, her paragraphs favour brevity. Nymph, a spy thriller centring around the isolated daughter, Bathory, of an assassin and an agent, follows the child from childhood to her 20s, as she learns the truth about her parents and must choose her own path.
Beginning with the precocious narration of a young girl, whose intelligence is made explicitly clear many times over, at the halfway point Bathory enters adulthood and soon adopts the disaffected tone that has become LaCava’s signature.
Here Bathory’s small world suddenly expands, she is a Latin scholar, a gifted college student, a lost soul keeping the company of sex workers and cops alike, whose nonchalance attracts the most entitled men. Despite the damaged individuals and high risk career path chosen by Bathory’s parents, there are few thrills in this thriller. LaCava replaces the dangerous with the banal, purposefully hollowing out the espionage genre.
Not only does Nymph explore many of the same themes as LaCava’s second novel I Fear My Pain Interests You, Bathory even adopts the moniker Margot, the same name as her last dejected narrator. This makes the moments Bathory-now-Margot plays at living in the gilded cage of privilege – with her textbook daddy issues and a detached approach to sexual partners – an affectation.
But this conscious layering of despondence doesn’t add any more depth to Nymph, it turns out that nihilism heaped on top of itself is simply more nothingness.
Nymph by Stephanie LaCava is out now (Verso, £11.99).
