Love, the pop star at the center of Candice Wuehle’s second novel, Ultranatural, feels familiar, like the idol we’ve all known since 1998 when she appeared on MTV singing and dancing through a high school in white button-down, pleated mini skirt, and thigh-high socks. Like Britney Spears, Love gets her big break as a teenager with a voice that is “velvety, too rich for a child,” yet fit for a “breathy baby doll.” Like Britney, Love wears a neon catsuit in a music video and performs with a “banana yellow boa constrictor that weighed more than I did.” Like Britney, Love shaves her head and goes to rehab. Like Britney, Love posts “strings of random emojis” to social media from a mansion tucked into the foothills west of Los Angeles; like Britney, her fortune is not her own to spend or control.
But while these parallels to our most iconic pop star’s meteoric rise and tabloid downfall shimmer through the pages of Ultranatural like sequins on costumes, Wuehle brings a fresh lens to the perils of superstardom, one that draws out the alienated labor at its core. Narrated by Love, the novel traces her transformation from 14-year-old Lacey Dove Bart, desperate to escape her Ohio hometown in 2005, to megastar with a residency at the Bellagio and abs insured for a million dollars in 2011, to plastic surgery addict who rarely leaves her mansion in 2016. It is a career shaped by Lacey’s quest for safety, which she equates with money and being watched by an audience—a quest that is continually exploited by men who surveil and control her body, image, and voice, the key elements of her livelihood. “I had given myself away in such small, intimate increments that I did not even realize there was nothing left anymore,” she confesses at the end of the novel. The harder she works, the more estranged she becomes from her self.
Wuehle is the only writer I would trust to write a spellbinding novel inspired by both the life of (and conspiracy theories surrounding) Britney Spears and the writings of Karl Marx. (Wuehle uses a quote from Marx’s essay “Estranged Labour” as an epigraph for the novel.) Her 2022 novel, Monarch, expertly surveyed the pitfalls of Y2K-era young womanhood, as it followed a former beauty queen’s realization that she had been programmed as a sleeper agent in an offshoot of Project MKUltra. Along the way, Monarch picked apart the greatest misogynistic hits of 1990s true crime pop culture—Lorena Bobbitt, Nicole Brown Simpson, and JonBenét Ramsey all feature in the beauty queen’s realizations about her past. Wuehle has continued her critiques of the power structures that underlie pop culture in her brilliant Substack newsletter “Bimbo Summit,” which takes its name from the 2006 front-page New York Post headline that accompanied a paparazzi shot of Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan piled together in the front seat of a car. Ultranatural remixes that infamous tabloid moment and others as ominous beats in a cursed tale, gasps for freedom that only ever result in more intense scrutiny of Love’s every move by her handlers and the press.
But the novel is not all misery—in fact, Lacey tells us as much in the opening lines: “Most stories are tragedies. This one isn’t, but it does start on the stone steps of an abandoned asylum for the insane.” At the core of the novel is her friendship with Carrie-Anne, with whom she hung out on those steps as a kid, writing lyrics and singing. It was Carrie-Anne who lit Lacey’s path out of Athens, Ohio, and Carrie-Anne who remains her only true link back. Framed with desperate, emoji-laden messages to Carrie-Anne, Ultranatural is the story of a woman fighting to reclaim herself by seeking to reconnect with the only person who ever really saw her.
The abandoned asylum had great acoustics, which is why Lacey and Carrie-Anne chose to rehearse there for their auditions for Newland Academy, a private performing-arts high school in Virginia that Carrie-Anne found on the internet. Through the girls’ intense relationship, Wuehle explores the disjuncture between art and commerce and how Lacey, in her desperation to escape Appalachia, falls into the trap of worshipping the latter. Wuehle makes Lacey’s fervent need to get out more than understandable; her Athens is a place where employment opportunities range from $7.50 an hour part-time work at the Sonic Drive-In to stripping at the Golden Horseshoe, where the male owners arbitrarily raise the price of renting pole time, outpacing tips. The Golden Horseshoe is where Carrie-Anne’s sister Austina works after graduating from Prairie High, where she had been the star of the track team; when she rebuffed her handsy coach, she lost his support for college track scholarships.
Lacey’s father regularly escapes Athens when he gets assigned routes as a long-haul trucker, though his income never seems enough to pay down the bills papering their refrigerator, and his steady diet of “bad news in bulk” and Yellow Jacket energy pills heightens his fury and unpredictability. Her churchgoing mother, “unable to do a single thing in the world without my father’s say-so,” becomes practically catatonic when he leaves on a new trucking job. Carrie-Anne’s mother, Deenie, the town psychic, is no better. In their cabin out in unincorporated territory, where the road was built by an anti-government militia, Deenie undergoes episodes of depression so severe that she appears dead.
In this bleak environment, the audition for Newland Academy feels life-or-death. But while Carrie-Anne believes their originality will open the door to this “incubator for young minds,” Lacey is convinced that they need to purchase matching costumes to communicate in the “secret language of the superficial.” This concern with looking the part and an obsession with what it will cost leads Lacey to take a job bagging groceries at Kroger as soon as she turns 15—a job that exposes her to unwanted and increasingly dangerous male attention.
But when the girls gain admission to Newland, only Carrie-Anne is truly satisfied. While Carrie-Anne flourishes in an environment where she can work on poetry chapbooks and compose an “experimental chamber piece” for choir—where she can make art without concern for its commercial appeal—all Lacey can focus on is how rich most of the other students are. When Lacey expresses envy of a girl who auditioned and got cast on a Christian television show called The Billy Bunny Hour, Carrie-Anne reminds her that “art’s not a pizza … you don’t get fewer slices because she got more.” To Lacey, this is “childish,” akin to a “lesson Billy Bunny himself shoved down the throats of poor kids so they’d stay poor. Carrie-Anne couldn’t understand credit cards or taxes or having an hourly job and she couldn’t understand what I was trying to say.”
While Lacey believes that “once money was involved and my talent was measured not by bullshit metrics like grades or school plays or admission committees, but by how much I could earn, life would get fairer,” she overlooks a key wisdom of Carrie-Anne’s—that a scarcity mentality “estranges us from one another, and worse, from ourselves.” It is Lacey’s misapprehension that bootstrap-style hard work would net her money and safety—influenced by the TV news her father was always blasting when he was home—that makes her vulnerable to men reaping the profits of her labor and disguising their plunder as protection.
Having richly evoked this background in the first half of Ultranatural, Wuehle traces just how far Lacey strays from her own essence—and from Carrie-Anne—as she rides the escalator of fame. That escalator is operated by a sleazy Christian entertainment executive whose “real name” is, unbelievably, Jimmy Coins, who takes Lacey from her own turn on The Billy Bunny Hour to promoting her first album in shopping-mall food courts, to touring the world for her second, “while impersonating a sexy baby from Anywhere, America, with a selective southern accent and astonishing tolerance for signing lines.” The schedule leaves Lacey drained. The press and public react with glee when she’s hospitalized for exhaustion; as Wuehle writes, “People were as fascinated by that as they were by the actual art, if you can call it art.”
At times, Wuehle lays on the labor commentary—and the Britney Spears parallels—a bit thick. “I Got It (U Take It),” the title song of Love’s first album, sounds an awful lot like Britney’s “Work Bitch”—its bridge consists of “an Auto-Tuned repetition of me singing ‘Bitch, you’re gonna work’ in a vaguely British accent,” which Carrie-Anne comments is “equivalent to a Karl Marx quote.” But it is this unrelenting focus on how much Lacey works, how little she reaps from it, and how much her fans fetishize it, that allows Wuehle to highlight the consequences of the extraction at the center of a pop star’s career. When Lacey appears to lose her mind in Ultranatural—under conditions just as sinister as Spears’s conservatorship, with no privacy and no ability to speak frankly with Carrie-Anne, the one person “who could explain me”—it makes perfect sense.
With her interior life stripped away, Lacey attempts to reclaim what Deenie termed the “inner sanctum”—“the place where you know what you know, where you recognize your own voice, where you think your own thoughts.” This metaphysical turn, where Lacey literally searches for her soul, allows Wuehle to upend what might look from the outside to be a pop star’s unraveling. When Lacey’s last album tanks because “one of the tracks was just bells and me singing about a light in the woods,” or when her cryptic social media posts “freak out the few thousand commenting fans I had left,” she has not lost touch with reality but the exact opposite. These erratic-seeming moves are her attempts to shirk the manufactured persona and voice Jimmy Coins thrust upon her.
It is only when Lacey is finally left alone by Jimmy and her cadre of handlers and the paparazzi and press—albeit in a manner so creepy and cruel that it makes conservatorships look like coddling—that she can rediscover what she actually thinks and feels. As she retells the story of her life in messages to Carrie-Anne, Lacey finds her real self.
