HERE IN THE DARK

When a New York theater critic is drawn into playing amateur detective, her dark world gets even darker.

"I am, of necessity, an imitation of myself—a sharp smile, an acid joke, an abyss where a woman should be. For a decade and more I have allowed myself only this lone role, a minor one: Vivian Parry, actor’s scourge and girl-about-town." In her debut, Soloski, a culture reporter at the New York Times, crafts a thriller narrated by Vivian Parry, a brittle, unhappy, relentlessly clever theater critic. Since her mother's untimely death when she was a college student snuffed out her desire and ability to be on stage, Vivian has found her only pleasure in attending plays and issuing brutal assessments of them expressed in “diamond bright” prose, coupled with daily recourse to pills, alcohol, and casual sex. Shortly after she deigns to be interviewed by a whiny man named David Adler for his master’s thesis, she receives a visit from his tearful fiancee saying he has disappeared and Vivian is the last person who saw him. As utterly out of character as it seems, she decides to go undercover to investigate Adler's disappearance; this is both preceded and followed by many more credibility-stretching events. It's worth at least pretending to suspend disbelief and ride out Vivian's Lost Weekend death spiral for whole slew of reasons—fun supporting characters (a louche actress best friend, a flamboyant receptionist at Vivian's magazine), ultra-snappy dialogue and metaphors, rough sex (if you like that sort of thing), and finally an over-the-top payoff that neatly pulls all the wild threads together, followed by a totally impossible but nonetheless touching denouement.

Like Dorothy Parker, the narrator's role model, this book is almost too clever for its own good.