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A review by blankpagealex
Made for Love by Alissa Nutting
5.0
Alissa Nutting's "Made for Love" was dark, funny, unpredictable and so much fun. This book is packed with ideas about love and sex in our increasingly connected world and explores the power dynamics inherent in any sexual encounter. Nutting does a masterful job of exploring the psyche of her two main characters without making either of them feel exclusively like victims or perpetrators. The crux of the argument when it comes to love and sex is that everything is complicated and Made for Love masterfully explores those intricacies through humorous and sometimes terrifying situations.
The story follows Hazel, a woman who escapes an emotionally abusive relationship with her husband Byron, the CEO of an all-encompassing technological empire called "Gogol" (no connection to real-world companies, obviously). She moves in with her aging father who has recently taken up with a sex doll to live out his twilight years in the company of a non-speaking partner. This is the first of many types of sexual relationships that happen between characters who have varying degrees of power.
Separately we meet Jasper, a handsome "Greek Jesus" looking con-man who convinces women to fall for him only to swindle them out of their life savings. After his latest con, Jasper experiences an encounter that, let's just say "alters" his sexual preferences in a way that he does not expect and creates a desire in him that he lacks the capacity to fulfill.
Jasper and Hazel's unfulfilled quest for love is explored by each of their encounters with various sexual situations and wildly different partners as the book comments on the way we see love and loneliness in a constantly connected world. Both characters seek to disappear from the public eye while they simultaneously long for companionship and connection and they are forced to confront that radical notion that human beings might need to find each other without technological intervention.
As the plot progresses, the characters find themselves in increasingly absurd situations until everything congeals in a climax that is totally unpredictable and immensely satisfying. Nutting crafts that rare ending that only increases appreciation for everything that came before it.
The story follows Hazel, a woman who escapes an emotionally abusive relationship with her husband Byron, the CEO of an all-encompassing technological empire called "Gogol" (no connection to real-world companies, obviously). She moves in with her aging father who has recently taken up with a sex doll to live out his twilight years in the company of a non-speaking partner. This is the first of many types of sexual relationships that happen between characters who have varying degrees of power.
Separately we meet Jasper, a handsome "Greek Jesus" looking con-man who convinces women to fall for him only to swindle them out of their life savings. After his latest con, Jasper experiences an encounter that, let's just say "alters" his sexual preferences in a way that he does not expect and creates a desire in him that he lacks the capacity to fulfill.
Jasper and Hazel's unfulfilled quest for love is explored by each of their encounters with various sexual situations and wildly different partners as the book comments on the way we see love and loneliness in a constantly connected world. Both characters seek to disappear from the public eye while they simultaneously long for companionship and connection and they are forced to confront that radical notion that human beings might need to find each other without technological intervention.
As the plot progresses, the characters find themselves in increasingly absurd situations until everything congeals in a climax that is totally unpredictable and immensely satisfying. Nutting crafts that rare ending that only increases appreciation for everything that came before it.