The Tuesday Review
A Little Bit Bad, the debut novel by Cassandra Neyenesch, starts with a man falling off a ladder. Reading this gleefully disorienting story, you’ll know how he feels.
Neyenesch’s book is a little bit of many things, none of them bad: It’s a feminist critique of parenting labor, a parody of true-crime documentaries, a tale of erotic obsession, and, most improbably, a murder mystery.
The narrator, Perdie, announces on the opening page that she hates “shows about unsolved crimes,” but that’s no guarantee she’ll solve the murder of her old lover. Lying in bed next to her husband at 4 a.m., she spots the headline on her phone: Nando was shot and killed in the street. That news sends her spinning back three years.
In those dull, prelapsarian days, Perdie had been only vaguely aware of the man working on her neighbor’s roof — “You know when someone is either handsome or kind of wild-looking, and you don’t know which it is?” — but they weren’t properly introduced until Nando’s ladder tipped sideways and hurled him 25 feet to the ground.
Perdie calls an ambulance and knows just what to say because she listens to 911 calls on YouTube. She keeps Nando talking while they wait for the paramedics: “So...you’re a drummer?”
When Nando whispers through bleeding lips, “What was your first album?” she wonders if she should tell him the truth or say something cool.
She tells us, “It felt like the beginning of love.”
It feels like the beginning of crazy, which may be love.
Neyenesch’s narrator is the exhausted mother of a toddler married to a tech dude named Theo who resents having to “babysit” his own son and starts choking when asked to change a diaper. After five years, she’s stopped expecting anything from her husband except gardening. “Theo’s soul was in the mulch,” she notes. It’s easier to hate him. Even the brusque efficiency of their sex life is now fine by her. “I don’t want to cuddle or stare into his eyes,” Perdie admits. “I’ve got shit to do.”
Everything about the success of this novel depends upon Perdie’s manic voice, this obsessively observant, sleep-deprived, conspiracy-minded, guilt-ridden, love-starved woman who’s losing her mind and her panties over a 26-year-old roofer who thinks he’s an anarcho-Marxist. She’s proof that if you’re tired enough and horny enough, even the most absurd situations can feel normal.
A Little Bit Bad burns along two timelines about three years apart. In the first, we follow Perdie’s feverish affair with Nando, who insists they have “cosmic, soul-devouring sex” in his car rather than subject himself to the humiliation of letting her pay for a hotel room.
In alternating chapters, Perdie endeavors to figure out how Nando died, all the while dodging his ex-girlfriend and staying one step ahead of the police. As a fanatical consumer of true-crime podcasts, she’s convinced she has the upper hand.
I asked Cassandra Neyenesch, “What do true-crime stories give Perdie that ordinary life doesn’t?”
A Little Bit Bad reads like Miranda July’s All Fours crouching over a domestic thriller. Neyenesch has a similarly hilarious take on the way cooped-up desire can ferment into an intoxicating hooch. Like July, she offers up explicit details with a kind of deadpan utilitarianism that’s shockingly funny. “I still feel like a foreigner mimicking local social conventions without really understanding them,” she says. “Nothing is too humiliating for me to tell you.” Believe her.
Perhaps because Neyenesch isn’t writing anything so close to autobiography, she’s more willing to subject her narrator to the lacerating self-scrutiny that July ultimately resists. In A Little Bit Bad, class privilege is not just a given, it’s a topic of sharp satire. Nando gives Perdie 20 DVDs of Noam Chomsky and Richard Dawkins and asks her for an employment reference. Perdie can afford to be offended — and clueless.
But even in her wildest moments, she can’t muzzle her inner critic:
“You dumb bimbo. Can’t you see what a cliché this is? Listen, you were depressed, you were ovulating, your son bit other kids, your husband came home and looked at you like What did you do all day...? And someone fell at your feet. It’s too obvious. Don’t be a skank.”
She sometimes shifts to the mock melodrama in which much of our internal lives take place — with visions of heroism or flashes of violent envy. Neyenesch is working in the same combustible register as Claire Vaye Watkins’s 2021 novel I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness. She knows how to drop self-incinerating lines about the impossible paradox of being a bright woman, mother, and lover trapped in her own head. “My weeks,” she says, “were gaping wastelands.” Her zany, depressive humor goes down like sugar-coated nettles.
Indeed, the search for Nando’s murderer frequently feels less urgent than the struggle for Perdie’s soul. She’s morally aware enough to understand what she’s doing, but not strong enough to resist it. “I was about to become one of those people who did whatever they wanted,” she laments. Buying groceries for an illicit tryst, she thinks, “I had my Trader Joe’s bag with me, because I am a good person.”
Neyenesch recently told The New Yorker that she’s been writing fiction every day for 30 years, which made me fear her first published novel would feel like an antique spoon polished to flimsy thinness. But this zany novel crackles with spontaneity and absurd wit. And as a new mystery writer, she has no trouble sprinkling false leads and misdirecting guileless readers like me who are just a little bit bad.◆
A Little Bit Bad, by Cassandra Neyenesch (Summit Books, 342 pp., $29)
Previous review: Douglas Stuart’s Best Novel Yet
“John of John” is a tender story of a father, a son, and the hard work of learning to love honestly.
"...like an antique spoon polished to flimsy thinness. "
I have simile envy.
Nice review, as always. Yup, I purchased the book too. Incidentally, I followed you from the WaPo. I'm sure you're aware that the Post hasn't published an original book review since they purged you and all the other staff several months ago. How can the newspaper published in the nation's capital NOT have a book section??