Life Has Always Been a Performance

Copies can be so much more appealing than their originals: Think of Andy Warhol’s silk-screened prints of Elizabeth Taylor and Mao Zedong and Jacqueline Kennedy, his hand-painted reproductions of Campbell’s soup cans. The title of Nothing Special, the Irish writer Nicole Flattery’s new novel, is itself a copy, derived, as Flattery has said, from an idea that Warhol once dreamed up for an unproduced talk show called The Nothing Special, which he envisioned to be about, well, nothing in particular.