When an author’s first book is an instant New York Times bestseller and receives the accolades heaped on Lisa Taddeo’s THREE WOMEN, a journalistic account of women’s sexual lives, there’s a certain pressure surrounding the publication of her next work, especially when it involves the switch from nonfiction to fiction.

Impressively, Taddeo’s raw, often devastating first novel, ANIMAL, only serves to confirm her considerable talent. It’s a propulsive piece of fiction, and both the importance of its themes and the quality of her writing lift it above what might have been mere sensationalism in the hands of a lesser writer. Following on the subject matter of THREE WOMEN, it also assures that on the subjects of female sexuality and patriarchy, hers will continue to be an important literary voice.

If you think that a novel whose first paragraph portrays the suicide by gunshot of the narrator’s married former lover in her presence as she dines with her current married romantic partner couldn’t grow darker, you would be wrong. Narrated by a character who admits that if someone asked her to describe herself in a single word, “depraved is the one I would use,” ANIMAL is the tumultuous story of one damaged woman’s troubled present and even more ravaged past.

"ANIMAL is a complex, graphic and often disturbing work. Lisa Taddeo expertly winds her story’s tension even as she’s leading readers on a trip deep into the darkness of Joan’s agitated mind."

Thirty-seven-year-old Joan, who considers herself “an expert at leaving,” abandons Manhattan within a few weeks of that tragedy for Los Angeles, where she hopes to find a woman named Alice, a well-known yoga instructor whose connection to her life slowly comes into focus in the course of the novel. She rents a home in Topanga Canyon from Lenny, an elderly widower still in mourning after the death of his wife a few months earlier. He lives in another small house on the property, which also includes another dwelling occupied by Kevin, a former rap star, and River, a young man who makes his home in a yurt in the meadow below her home.

Whether they involve her dead lover Vic, once her boss at a New York advertising agency, or the man she nicknames Big Sky for the picture-perfect Montana second home he shares with his equally idealized family, Joan’s long-term relationships are distinguished by her submission to the will of older, powerful men, contributing to what she sees as her “penchant for a certain flavor of man, a certain type of imbecilic self-destruction.” Save for an encounter with River, Joan’s casual liaisons, not surprisingly, are no more satisfying.

Flashbacks to what she calls the “grand calamity of my childhood” in the home of an emotionally distant mother and an affectionate but unfaithful father gradually shed light on the roots of Joan’s distress. After the deaths of her parents when she’s 10 years old, the tragic circumstances of which aren’t revealed until near the end of the novel, she’s raised by an assertive aunt named Gosia. “She trained me in the art of sexual combat,” Joan writes. “She told me women must deploy all their strengths in order to prevail.”

The success of Gosia’s training is mixed, at best, but Joan’s childhood trauma and her exploitative relationships, as Taddeo portrays them in all their pain and devastation, have combined to transform her into a woman at times consumed by an anger so intense that the thought of murder is never far from her mind. “Killing becomes something that isn’t outlandish,” she reflects. “When you’ve seen what I have, a number of awful things become practical.”

But ANIMAL isn’t only a novel about the fraught relationships between women and men. Taddeo devotes considerable attention to the complicated friendship between Joan and Alice, 10 years younger than Joan, who finds her “so unequivocally flawless that I wanted to hit her.” They meet when Alice becomes a customer at the health food café where Joan works, and Joan’s attraction soon shades toward obsession: “When I looked at Alice, I didn’t want her. What I wanted was to eat her, swallow her, and become her.”

There’s also an extended encounter between Joan and Eleanor, Vic’s daughter, some two decades Joan’s junior. Eleanor has followed Joan to California, bent on avenging the death of her father she believes is the older woman’s responsibility, but in Joan’s mind she becomes “a mirror of me.”

Especially when it comes to evoking the sun-drenched, sometimes trendy, often seedy atmosphere of Southern California, Taddeo’s sensibility invites comparison to the work of Joan Didion. She favors short, declarative sentences, many of which land with the force of an uppercut to the jaw, as in this description of Joan’s new home among the canyon’s rattlesnakes and coyotes: “I was filled with terror because already the street didn’t look charming. It was treeless and the house was at the top of a steep gravel driveway. It was the highest point of Topanga Canyon, nearly piercing the clouds. Mostly it looked like someplace to make meth.”

ANIMAL is a complex, graphic and often disturbing work. Lisa Taddeo expertly winds her story’s tension even as she’s leading readers on a trip deep into the darkness of Joan’s agitated mind. Her portrait of “the female rage that builds for decades” and what happens when it’s unleashed is both unsettling and unforgettable.