Alissa Nutting's Tampa was prompted by the case of a predatory teacher she once knew. TAMPA By Alissa Nutting Faber, $27.99 Eleven years ago, Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal imagined an illicit relationship between a schoolteacher and a student. Two years later brought Emily Maguire's Taming the Beast, in which a girl seduced by a teacher struggles to recalibrate her life. That same year, Debra Lafave pleaded guilty to lewd and lascivious battery: she'd been caught having sex with her 14-year-old student. The case caught Alissa Nutting's attention - she'd been to school with Lafave - and it is just such a nexus of adulthood, childhood and sexuality that forms the basis of Nutting's debut novel, Tampa. Tampa's sex scenes are vivid and sometimes stirring, making the reader complicit in Celeste's enjoyment. On the eve of her first day teaching middle school, 26-year-old Celeste Price is occupied not with curriculum or pedagogy, but preparing herself like some delicate dessert: "I wanted my body to seem made of readily edible fruit." Her ablutions form just one part of the groundwork; in her first staff meeting, Celeste scores a lockable, standalone classroom, and later masturbates behind its desk, hoping the baptism will paint the air "with pheromones that would tell the right pupils everything I wasn't allowed to verbalise." Nutting's controversial debut novel, Tampa. Celeste, who is attracted only to teenage boys, knows her proclivities, and is canny and relentless in satisfying them. Her marriage to wealthy Ford is but a smokescreen for her perversity. Caution is her watchword only insofar as it will permit her to pursue these boys, "undeniably male but not man." Aware the wrong boy might "kiss and tell" or reject her advances, Celeste takes her time selecting the first target. Because of his timid demeanour and pliability, it's blond, diminutive Jack Patrick who catches her eye. Jack, a shy boy with no sexual experience, is powerless to resist Celeste's insistent seduction and her fair-haired, well-maintained beauty. Their couplings are disturbing: Celeste's manipulative poses and pornographic repertoire never quite gel with Jack's stutteringly earnest appeals. They are two cogs that will eventually unmesh and tear their parent machinery apart. In the meantime, Celeste's avidity knows no bounds. The couple fall into a routine: sex in the back of the car and burgers afterwards. It's tempting to loathe Celeste. Completely amoral and categorically sociopathic, careful but not ashamed, she takes advantage of adolescents' burgeoning sexuality in order to feed her "roaring" appetite. Her fixation on young men reaches cartoonishly desperate heights; at one stage she imagines pawing through Jack's rubbish to find his semen-soiled tissues. Nevertheless, Jack through Celeste's eyes is scarcely more than a cipher - she isn't interested in him as an individual but as the best specimen she can access. As a moral issue, this disregard for his individuality and emotions is worthy of condemnation, but as a fictional creation, Jack is little more than an abstract and, eventually, predictable plot device. Similarly, Celeste's cuckolded husband, Ford, inspires little interest or sympathy, presented simply as a conveniently dim obstacle to her needs. Nutting's writing is strongest when channelling Celeste's egocentric, brazen thoughts; this knack for intense, focused first-person narratives also featured in Nutting's short-story collection Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls. Her sharp observations simultaneously amuse and alienate: scathing about everyone except herself and the boys she craves, Celeste sketches an unpleasant portrait of suburban Tampa, filled with the "caffeinated ponytails" of women, and clueless middle-age men. But this drama plays out on a personal stage rather than a societal one. While not a villain of Humbert Humbert's confronting complexity, Celeste is pitiable. The corollaries of her all-consuming lust for teenagers are a savage distaste of ugliness (personified here in the comically clumpy Janet Feinlog) and a fear of ageing tied to the inevitable decline of her looks. Her lack of control condemns her to a life determined by illegal desires: "At times," she thinks with rare insight, "I wished that my genitals were prosthetic, something I could slip out of." Though morality and plot inhere in the story of Celeste Price, they are not its strengths, nor its heart. Tampa is best thought of as an absorbing character study: a searing combination of youth, sex and power, refracted through the warped prism of a temptress. ■ Estelle Tang is a writer, an editor and a bibliotherapist at The School of Life.