Plot of A Little Bit Bad Sounds like the setup for a joke: “Like, this white woman is lusting after her hot Chicano roofer?” The narrator Perdita Jungfrau is describing her situation. “Yuck.”
It is 2009 and Perdita is 39 when she meets 25-year-old Nando, who is working on the roof next door. “Burned out” after working as a hospital social worker for a decade, she is a stay-at-home mom to a toddler, and is pregnant again (though she doesn’t know it yet). He is not happy. Her husband criticizes her for quitting her job and not taking care of the children: “Children scare me!” Perdita was in her San Diego backyard that day when Nando fell off the front steps of a neighbor’s house. She sees this happening, calls an ambulance and sits beside him on the grass to wait.
“Do you know when someone looks beautiful or wild, and you don’t know which it is?” Nando’s face is freckled and has two small pimples where his nose has been broken twice. He describes himself as an “anarcho-Marxist” and “expresses opinions in a calm, unemotional manner”. He reads Frantz Fanon’s book The Wretched of the Earth on his lunch break, but his college “somehow missed out” and he is struggling to make a living in the post-crash economy.
Perdita and Nando should make an odd couple, but they don’t. They are both raw and fragile, and they share a sense of joy in the abyss. (When Perdita’s son bites the face of another child in the group, Nando understands perfectly well: “He just likes the taste of human flesh”.) Their attraction feels genuine – there’s something tense and a sense of mystery between them when they’re alone. When differences arise between them, that also seems realistic.
A Little Bit Bad New Yorker is Neynesh’s debut novel. It is released in the wake of Miranda July’s hugely successful All Force, another story of a middle-aged California wife who discovers a strong desire for a younger man and goes on the run. Where July’s novel focuses on the “liberated life” of a perimenopausal woman, Neynesh’s novel takes a different turn. A second storyline, set a year later in 2010, runs parallel to the story of the affair. Nando is murdered, and Perdita is trying to solve the case (she is devastated, and is also a fan of true crime).
Like All Might, A Little Bit Bad features a career-related plot that flits between the everyday drudgery of mother-life and a heightened, surreal or fantasy mode. My favorite character is an owl with the face of a woman who occasionally appears before Perdita and addresses her in the voice of a man who works at the local pawn shop. Beyond its fantastical flights of fancy, All Force is concerned with the politics of biology and a midlife woman’s “true self”, while A Little Bit Bad is more interested in social injustice. The military-industrial complex, the “good Obamaverse,” and the carceral system all feature. At its most poignant, the novel raises questions about the structural violence of a culture that privileges the normative nuclear family. To some extent, it moves away from focusing on the middle-class mother and asks who actually feels that violence.
This is also very fun. I was reminded of the heroines of Halle Butler’s novels – Perdita could have been her older sister, another cruel fool with a talent for inappropriate behavior. (Absolutely Her son cuts faces.) Neynesh’s comedic excellence and sharp insight sometimes comes at the expense of blunt things like emotion. When Nando falls down the stairs and lies on the ground between life and death, Perdita, kneeling next to him, sees the blood coming out of him as “exit-sign red”. There is something here that may seem serious to the reader, but the narrative chooses a smart humor, and those emotions never come too close.
There were points at which I wondered whether Neneesh was intentionally satirizing All Force, or more broadly the trend towards manic fictional celebrations of older women going rogue. Of course, she’s laughing at her California-flavored ideas about self-expression. One chapter has the wonderful title “The Roofer Holds Room for My Feelings”.
This story is sad at heart. A touch of satire brings it back from the abyss, and that’s probably for the best. I thoroughly enjoyed every single page. The plot is constructed for compulsive reading: the two storylines are told in separate chapters, and as the case begins to cool, the mystery of the murder grows. The central couple is dazzling and adorable. They get up on stage at an open-mic night on their first date. Perdita raps, while Nando, at her side, does “an Irish clog dance”. The audience is happy.
