Nymph – Stephanie LaCava

[Verso; 2025]

Always on the cusp of something indistinguishable and yet never fully realized, Stephanie LaCava’s third novel, Nymph, is a study in narrative restraint. The novel arrives as the loose conclusion to an unofficial trilogy that began with The Superrationals and continued with I Fear My Pain Interests You, two works that anticipate Nymph both linguistically and thematically. Throughout her career, LaCava has already developed a recognizable literary terrain: alienated female protagonists, abstruse cultural milieus, and language that prefers suggestion over declamation. However, Nymph has the most explicit genre anatomy in LaCava’s brand of fiction.Ostensibly an espionage thriller set in the near future, the novel follows Bathory, or Bath (pronounced “Bat”), as she treks through her lonesome adolescence and into young adulthood in New York City. Wildly independent and hyper-intellectual, Bath becomes an assassin—an occupation that has become a multi-generational family tradition. Along with her main profession, she is also a linguist, model, and sex worker—roles that echo LaCava’s fascination with performance and disguise. LaCava’s artistic ethos is one of coding and decoding, a semiotic structure that both her characters and her readers must decipher. Even Bathory’s name functions as a cipher, referencing both black metal and a mythologized female killer, because “a good cover is lore.”

Like other main characters in LaCava’s novels, Bathory’s familial ennui is the center of her emotional landscape. Her parents are insular and secretive. Their actions and speech exist in code, always hinting at some possible outcome that never presents itself. They instill in Bath a deep intellectual rigor and a proclivity for Latin, which eventually becomes a partial cover for her real occupation. Both characters are short-lived, however, as Bath’s father disappears early on and her mother recedes into detachment. With them, the illusion of structural coherence dissolves. The absence of her father, specifically, creates a haze that lingers over Bathory and forces her into independence. Her only remaining connection to him surfaces through members of their shared espionage synecdoche, among them a recurring romantic interest named Iggy.

Told in first-person narration, LaCava’s novel obliges the reader to actively decode dialogue and character motivations. Bathory’s feelings about her family arrive almost instantly and act as emotional scaffolding:

Feelings can never change the contracted plan. Well, maybe in one instance, and even then it’s more intuition and romance than plain feelings. A chance meeting and the clan may expand. Birth is non-negotiable. (If anyone can say they tried to get out of it, I can.) I would fight it, but the end is inevitable. You get a second chance to have the family you wanted, but it doesn’t always arrive on time or in the form you expected.

Bathory’s fatalism reveals a philosophy of family predicated upon an inevitability, a dejection of intimacy as a familial expectation. As is the case with almost every facet of her life, structure and obscurity supersede this intimacy. Bathory’s profession as an assassin is perhaps the most ideal of all metaphors for her character. In other words, her occupation compels her to exist as she already is. Even without the secrecy required from espionage, Bathory’s remove would remain the same. In this sense, absence and disconnection become the propulsive facet of Nymph. Much like LaCava’s brilliantly clipped, lyrical sentences, Bathory longs for connection but is chained to a congenital obfuscation.

This tension between immediacy and distance finds a natural analogue in the novel’s near-future setting. The alienation found in a technology-saturated world acts as an extension of Bathory as both a person and an entity of espionage. Much like our contemporary setting as readers, Bathory’s world is composed of suffocating digital networks and surveillance. This digital milieu leaks into LaCava’s prose:

There had been a neat disconnect because I trafficked in an ancient language and he in code. Nothing, ever, was one to one. This allowed the connection a plasticity but kept it from getting all that deep. With Iggy, it was the reverse: we hadn’t spoken in years, but what was between us still held weight—for me. It was alive, but suspended in 4D.

Incredibly taut passages like this mirror the disconnect felt between Bath and almost every other character in Nymph. She hosts a constant clash between the ancient and contemporary ways of living, between age-old languages and new-age digital codes, between the tangible and virtual. This discrepancy between Bath and her central love interest, Iggy, suggests a fundamental incapability for connection. They are presumably the same age, and yet it is as if the two hail from different epochs. Much of LaCava’s prose functions by these disparities in time or ideology that allow her fiction to hover between eras and locations instead of anchoring to one single idea.

The novel’s setting is such an example. The New York City in which Bath inhabits feels more in tune with the ‘70s punk scene than it does a futuristic metropolis. LaCava’s rendering of New York is grisly and doused in squalor, with odd figures on every corner that are reminiscent of the Times Square scene of old. Nymph’s everchanging setting is paradoxical, where the dated and contemporary exist in tandem with one another, conflating into a fantasy world.

If Nymph gestures toward a cyberpunk city of new or a vintage city of old, it does so by implication. LaCava’s prose is simultaneously contemporary and a thing of the past. Nymph presents everything yet never progresses past suggestion. In many ways, this is LaCava’s strong suit, but with so much narrative immaterialism, certain passages can begin to feel superfluous.

As far as the link between narrative and characterization goes, LaCava prioritizes the poetization of inner turmoil, of the lack of action itself, which can drift into the realm of ornament instead of necessity. The slack that LaCava brings to certain passages will work for most readers because of a sustained focus on a sense of time and place, a distinct milieu in which audiences can inhabit. LaCava’s artistry has never been one of spellbinding narratives, therefore the swings she takes in Nymph are not alienating, but work to reaffirm her audience.

Ultimately, the espionage plot recedes, and what remains is inheritance and heredity: the way children absorb parents’ professions and emotional ways of being. Bathory’s true occupation is translation—of secrecy, of remoteness, of Latin even, all in LaCava’s distinguishable code. Nymph is less about assassins or a cyberpunk future than about the long half-life of family. What emerges is a novel that gradually abandons genre in favor of atmosphere, exchanging the propulsion of the espionage thriller for something slower and more effusive. The novel suggests that, despite our technological age, the most enduring codes are those of family, inheritance, and the untranslatability of emotion.

Joseph Dimacchia is a writer and critic from Cleveland, Ohio. His work has appeared in Offscreen, Rivener Literary, DMovies, and elsewhere.