The Lens of Desire: Eye Miniatures (ca. 1790–1810) | Philadelphia Museum of Art / PD Worldwide, CC0
With her sharp, minimalistic prose and unsparing insights into the female psyche, author Stephanie LaCava is something of a Jean Rhys for the new millennium. In her novels I Fear My Pain Interests You and The Superrationals, LaCava examines complex antiheroines navigating the culture industry, living independently in urban settings, and taking emotionally avoidant approaches in dealing with men. Mathilde in The Superrationals works for an art gallery, traveling to Paris to unearth her dead mother’s past; Margot, a nepo baby neglected by her self-absorbed parents in I Fear My Pain Interests You, confronts her own inability to feel pain (metaphorically and literally: She has congenital analgesia).
LaCava’s heroines participate in the tradition of the antiheroic flâneuse, familiar from the twentieth-century novels of Jean Rhys, Albertine Sarrazin, and Colette—and more recently popularized for a still larger audience through figures like Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City. For these characters, an attractive public-facing veneer is a kind of disguise, an alibi that hides the secret identity from prying eyes.
In her new novel, Nymph (Verso, 2025), LaCava takes these questions of surveillance, gender, and selective disclosure to a new extreme in the coming-of-age story of Bathory (Bath), who grows up the daughter of two spies. Bath navigates the high-stakes lifestyle of an assassin while at the same time experiencing the desire for intimacy, the emotional risk of building friendships, and the self-exploration of a girl in her early twenties living in a big city.
At the onset of the novel, Bath relates the tale of how her pregnant mother tried to drown herself only to be saved by a Massachusetts fisherman. “No one ever saw the fisherman again,” Bath reflects. “I’m not sure he ever existed.” This blur of myth and reality will continue through the book in a hazy, almost mystical procession of events. Bath, an unreliable narrator, has secrets that she refuses to confess on the page for practical reasons (like who she or her parents work for), but her dreamy and dissociative narration also suggests a less conscious repression of memories, including scenes of violence that either are half-recalled in snatches of graphic detail or occur off-page.
As a young girl growing up in the idyll of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Bath shows a precocious interest in Latin, and enjoys reading anything she can get her hands on, “signs and letters” she uses to bolster her own intelligence. Her introversion alienates the kids around her; conversely, it also protects her from their judgment. Bath’s parents hide the true nature of their work until she is old enough to understand it, but revelatory glimpses flicker through what’s not said. As a child, Bath walks into her dad monitoring several surveillance cameras at once to carry out a mission. While he works, her father watches another screen showing highlights of Kobe Bryant playing for the Lakers, self-administering the familiar spectacle of sport as a kind of sedative. Some time later, she meets with her therapist on a video call and casually mentions her father’s disappearance and her mother receiving death threats. The therapist thinks her young patient is joking and hangs up on her, saying she needs to talk to Bath’s parents.
Bath’s first confrontation with violence occurs when she is a teenager, caught in the middle of an ops raid on a mansion. Even with her skinny, girl-child body, she realizes the power she has over men armed with weapons and “years of experience” after they release her out of disgust and desire. Bath learns to use her nymph-like femininity as a protective sheen of secrecy and manipulation. By the time Bath moves to New York City for university, it’s clear her father is not coming back; he lingers as a ghostly vacuum that drives her emotional detachment and later relationships with men.
New York City provides the ideal setting for Bath to live but also hide. Scenes in the back of taxicabs, bodegas, apartment buildings, an alley behind the building where a modeling agency holds auditions, orange seats on the subway, and numbered street addresses provide a disjointed love letter to Manhattan, a borough of 1.68 million people, where anyone can reinvent themselves but still disappear in a crowd of tens of thousands of people.
LaCava is preoccupied with questions of visibility—and with it, surveillance and privacy in the age of tech and social media, where our phones encourage a limitless, performative transparency that obsolesces interiority, where ride-hail apps pressure users to upload selfies, and where AI covertly collects private information from every saccharine confession. The omnipresent influencer, an arguably feminized archetype, offers a winking mirror to a life Bath might have led: When Bath goes to a modeling audition and is offered opportunities she turns them down, unable to conceive of relinquishing her private life when the state can use it against her.
“When you’re taught as a child not to covet fame, you never want to be the one watched,” Bath reflects, after turning down a modeling gig in Paris. “All eyes off.” And in another memorable passage: “I was born an extremist and I’d die one. No one’s attention should come from someone else’s orders.”
And secrecy is indeed a form of extremism in late capitalist New York City, as the female body becomes a site of information-gathering, objectification, of watching and being watched. Caro, a friend, presents an effective foil to Bath. Like Bath, Caro is self-interested and slightly nihilistic, but in a different way, leveraging her body and proximity to men to climb the echelons of capitalism. Bath’s body is a private contract, a disguise of her true self, answerable to nobody except the nameless agency for which she deploys herself as a weapon. If Caro gravitates to exhibitionism as power, not unlike most beautiful Instagram influencers today, Bath, by now an assassin in training and running a stationery shop as a front, is almost paranoid about holding onto her selfhood and privacy.
This constant awareness of surveillance inflects Bath’s other relationships, including an unlabeled, noncommittal, grimly long-running sexual entanglement with James, a startup bro and cryptographer, and a deadlocked love affair with Iggy, a childhood friend who, being an assassin himself, poses a perpetual risk to Bath. Again, Bath’s dissociative state and patchy narration hint at unprocessed trauma behind her hesitance to be totally close with anyone.
The climax of the novel, like its violence, happens off-page. When Bath once more loses someone she loves to the family business, the reader is witness only to Bath’s hurt and confusion, and fragmented memories. The sphinx-like secrecy under which Bath has retreated possesses layers that have yet to be revealed; a reader can’t help but want more, for the puzzle of signs and symbols to finally cohere.
In an age oversaturated by hyper-visibility and performance, Bath’s retreat into mystery makes the case for tricking the gaze, like the nymph Iggy names her for, shimmering underneath murky waters. LaCava underscores that surveillance should be understood as a shared concern, telling the Los Angeles Review of Books: “Of course she’s being watched. You’re watching her!” Even so, a sequel couldn’t hurt: A nymph seduces with mysterious unavailability as much as beauty, ever leaving the reader asking for more.
