She gets a job as a barista and meets a variety of men who want to sleep with her, including Lenny, her senile landlord, and River, a 22-year-old dropout who lives in a yurt. In Los Angeles her days are filled with ruminating and shoplifting. “Women with long braids rode them over rocks.”

“There were lots of horses in the canyon,” she observes wryly. Joan, a quintessential New Yorker, is comically immune to its charms. Her journey ends in Southern California, where she rents a house overlooking Topanga Canyon. “Along the drive I had been wanting to sleep with a real cowboy, someone without social media,” she explains. “At first I enjoyed all the praise and then I started to feel like I deserved everything I got, that he had nothing to do with it.”Īfter Vic’s death, Joan sets off on a cross-country road trip, pausing briefly for a one-night stand with a traveling salesman she meets in Texas, whom she seduces simply because his name is John Ford. “At a certain point, I began to rely on Vic for everything,” she admits. “It becomes all about your own performance, your own body and how it looks on the outside, the way it moves above this man who, for you, is only a spectator.” “I can tell you a lot about sex with a man to whom you are not attracted,” Joan says.

The memory of their affair hangs like Spanish moss over the first half of the book. (No spoilers here: It literally happens in the first paragraph.) The dead man is Vic, the avuncular creative director of the Manhattan ad agency where Joan works, a besotted sugar daddy who mentored, promoted, bedded, spoiled and stalked her.

The novel opens with an actual bang: Joan’s married boss, with whom she’s had a protracted affair, bursts into a restaurant where she’s having dinner with another man and shoots himself in front of her. Voracious and obsessive, Joan is addicted to love and its analogues - in particular, the adoration of men who happen to be married to someone else. “If someone asked me to describe myself in a single word, depraved is the one I would use.” So says Joan, the barely hinged, 30-something narrator of “Animal,” the propulsive, fiercely confident debut novel by Lisa Taddeo.

Animal by lisa taddeo review