Olive Nuttall’s novel Kitten is one of the most important books I’ve read in years. Important on a personal level – the only level I can write or talk about books. I love this book, and this love makes it hard to write about Kitten – I love it and I hold it close, it has completely changed my heart and returned the pleasure of reading to me. This kind of love is never objective, but perhaps objectivity is not the point of a response to art. Objectivity is not my only barrier though. For me, the experience of reading this book is so centred in the body that words feel a bit useless when talking about it.
I keep thinking about this quote from Richard Powers about music:
‘I think [writers are] jealous. There’s a way in which the appeal of music, in sidestepping everything semantic and reaching into your rib-cage and massaging your heart, is just such a matter of envy to novelists who have to mediate everything with words that mean things and the specificity of which, and the real-world reference of which, can often get in the way of the sublime and that sense of communicating directly to the body.’
In Kitten, Nuttall achieves what Powers says the novel can’t – sidestepping everything semantic and communicating directly with the body.
Nuttall is an amazing writer, and on a sentence level there is no shortage of beautiful writing that could be equated with some of the elements of music. There are incredibly well-crafted lyrical descriptions of natural, urban and virtual worlds. But I think what really makes the book such a pleasure for me to read comes down to an idea that I think we talk about in fiction but not enough – consent. I think when we do talk about consent it’s often in a way that devolves into arguments about content warnings and extra-textual elements. These are of course important but there’s something so much more intrinsic and sewn into the very cloth of Kitten which is an exciting development in the novel.
I’ve found little pleasure in the act of reading for several years. I haven’t stopped reading and I’ve felt positive about books after finishing them, but the act of reading has come with an incredible tension that I wasn’t able to pinpoint. A visceral, sick feeling. I checked my glasses prescription, the way I was sitting when I read, whether our house had flaking asbestos, but it seemed to be coming from an emotional trigger.
There have of course been exceptions. I’ve found less of this physical/emotional sensation when reading poetry. Joon Oluchi Lee’s novel Neotenica was a joy to read. I also re-read almost everything by Bae Suah partly hoping it would catapult me back into enjoying reading but in all cases, I opened the next book and the tension returned. The day Kitten arrived I sat down to start it, intending to stop when the sickness got too bad. This is the way I’ve been reading most books for the last few years. Instead, I ‘came-to’ six hours later reading the last page feeling almost ecstatic. I feel grateful to have the permission and opportunity to respond to the book in writing because it’s allowed me to get to the bottom of my reading problem by working out how Kitten conquered it. This is one of the reasons Kitten is so important to me.
Fiction by its nature is manipulative. A novel doesn’t work if the writer isn’t lying to a certain extent – we withhold information for effect, we misdirect, we present people in bad faith. Where this kind of manipulation had been ‘fun’ for me, as a result of ‘real-life’ events I had become particularly sensitive to this effect in writing. In 2022, I made a BSA complaint about an interview with Kathleen Stock conducted by Kim Hill on RNZ. The basis of this complaint was that Stock was using misinformation to manipulate people’s thoughts about the trans experience. It was a really long and depressing process that ended with an email in 2023, informing me that the BSA had not upheld the complaint. This is a micro to the macro I was experiencing everywhere else in my life. It felt like all anyone needed to do was say something was true, and it was true. I found this heartbreaking, largely because this is exactly what we do in fiction – and I was seeing it weaponised to bring hate toward people I loved deeply. This coupled with the capitalist and colonial work the canon does has made it hard for me not to conclude that this kind of violence is inherent in fiction.
And I think this is at the root of my reading sickness. I’m acutely aware of the made-up nature of what I’m reading and I can’t relax because I recognise in it the violence I see used in the world outside the book. As well as a degree of manipulation on the writer’s part, fiction needs a degree of surrender on the reader’s part. And this was the thing I was struggling with. I didn’t feel safe surrendering. Instead, my body was hypervigilant, and this was making me feel physically sick.
What makes Kitten different, what made reading it such a pleasure, was that I trusted it. I’m sure it was not Nuttall’s intention to write a book that made me feel safe, and nor should it be. And not all readers will feel safe in it. The book is dedicated ‘for the girls’, so there are things I will never fully ‘get’ about this book but I think it shows that when work is made by, for and about communities, amazing – perhaps unintended – things can happen for other audiences. Even when this is not and should not be the work of authors writing for and about the communities they’re part of.
I want to be incredibly clear that this is not a ‘safe’ book. It deals with the hardest, most upsetting things. One of the things that sets it apart is the commitment to the book’s intended audience. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that most books written about sexual assault, sadomasochism and the trans experience have not been written ‘for the girls’. They have been written for a mainstream audience by an author outside these communities. These books therefore have needed to rely on conventional elements of fiction that mainstream audiences will recognise and appreciate as ‘good writing’. I’d like to suggest that inherent in these conventional solutions to the fiction problems is violence.
What sets Kitten apart is in its successful break with these conventions. A break I think comes from the implicit needs that arise when we write for different audiences and with different intention. Kitten is incredibly readable, it’s an incredibly successful contemporary novel on any terms. What Nuttall does is subtle and incredibly precise. It’s a surgical shift rather than a demolition of the form but it is no less revolutionary than other books that burn the old ways to the ground.
The first-person narrator, Rosemary, is open and aware. She shows us as much as she can see, and although things are hidden from her by the author in order for the book to work, the revelation of these things is so well managed by Nuttall there is no sense of impending jump-scare. I’m sure there are plenty of names for this but the experience I had was of giving constant and enthusiastic consent to the book, which meant I was able to enjoy the reading experience. Again, I want to reiterate, this doesn’t mean the book shied away from events that made it an incredibly affecting work, and there are definitely surprises and unexpected outcomes but I felt I was ‘with’ the book the whole way. What’s massively impressive – and should be a challenge to all fiction writers (myself included) – is that this sense of consent was done using the tools of craft. Nuttall’s control of perspective, narrative and tone is what gives Kitten this sense of consent. Over my years of teaching, I’ve often said a work feels in ‘safe hands’, but I’m not sure I’ve fully understood what that means until I read this book. It’s mind-blowing to watch the tools that have in so many other places been weaponised for hate, repurposed in this novel to create something of such immense pleasure. A pleasure that is complicated and challenging, sure, but often just plain glorious. Nuttall is a practised and adept writer who you should take every opportunity to read.
Of course, the obvious parallel with the reading experience I’m describing is good sex. The reason I’ve framed my reading of Kitten in this way is probably the interest the book takes in sex. Nuttall’s incredible ability is nowhere more on show than in Kitten’s sex scenes, which are thrilling but also used to great effect for the narrative, character and world of the novel. The sex moves the story along like the best car chases in The Fast and the Furious and the best songs in musicals. I was particularly impressed with the writing around S&M. The ‘straight’ world seems obsessed with S&M. From Normal People to any number of naked-dead-women crime shows, sadomasochism is often used as a short-hand for damage or instability. Time and again in these mainstream depictions it is blisteringly clear these relationships are used to serve some narrative or character issue that comes from outside the experience itself. A kind of ball-gagged ghost in the machine.
Although there is no way kink communities should be doing any of the emotional labour, the straight world could learn so much about consent from them. Each year the mainstream pushes the envelope on the sex it is prescribing as normal this season (I saw several mainstream films this year that included scenes of oral sex during menstruation). I think this cultural policing of what is inside and outside normal sexual behaviour means that people engaging in the acts deemed ‘normal’ think consent from the other person is implicit. Not unlike the act of writing something new for a new audience, in sex that falls outside the ‘sanctioned norms’ new language is often required and that means talking, and often that means consent designs the sex act. This is what Kitten understands fundamentally, and this is the world in which the sex in the present moment of the novel takes place. This focus on consent and its relationship to pleasure is signalled in the first pages. Despite what many in the straight world say, consent is not difficult to recognise and Nuttall teaches the reader, through Rosemary’s voice and the narrative of the book, how to read each sex act in a consent framework. The effect of this is not that the book slips into an instructive text but instead allows the reader to understand the nature of the sex, which I think makes the depictions of good sex easier to enjoy. Nothing is wasted in this book and the sex-writing is an integral part of the telling. In this way the consent framework works as an incredible tool in plot and narrative.
Though the power structures in our society often want to categorise us by the sex we have, one of the things that makes Kitten such an incredibly satisfying read is the fullness of Rosemary’s life. Probably in Nuttall’s hands a book focused solely on a free urban life of sex, flatmates and work would have been just as compelling. However, Kitten is not this book. It’s in the bleed of Rosemary’s family and personal lives that the rubber of this book really hits the road. The return home is becoming a well-explored narrative in trans art but Kitten reinvents even this story. The problem that gives the book momentum is not the return home. While the return home aggravates the inciting events at the core of the book, the family life depicted in Kitten feels fresh and not like many you’ll read anywhere else.
The writer Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore delivered a talk in 2021 called ‘Writing On Your Own Terms’ in which she described the mainstream’s interest in queer art during the Aids epidemic. Sycamore talks about how once the mainstream adopts/sanctions the work of communities they have hitherto ignored they begin to define art from these communities in ways that work for them – financially often, but also with the aim of making the work palatable or grateful for audiences outside these communities. In this way, they centre readers from outside the author’s communities. The antedote Sycamore suggests for this phenomenon is ‘to instead write on your own terms, toward community, and specifically toward the community of people who might truly appreciate and understand your work’. I think Kitten is an exemplar of this kind of art.
It’s not easy to write against what most readers have been moulded to expect and offer them a new lens, but this is perhaps the greatest success of Kitten. Nuttall has produced a novel that feels true to an experience with no aspirations of speaking for all experiences. She has produced an incredibly readable novel that breaks cleanly and beautifully with many conventions. Kitten is part of the cutting edge of something incredibly exciting that’s happening in Aotearoa. (It’s thrilling for me that Kitten shares its launch day with another exceptionally good book – Sylvan Spring’s Killer Rack.) Both these books redefine their form in a way that is an incredible antidote to the weaponisation of language. This is a new wave that gives me great joy and hope.
Kitten by Olive Nuttall (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30) is available in bookstores nationwide.
