Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. (The narrator has a Russian Jewish background and dwells on a patient suffering from “Shoah grief.”) But ultimately Madievsky captures the mood of a woman working hard to connect with a sense of self, and she has an excellent arsenal of metaphors for disconnection: “The city splayed open like a surgical patient,” “the sky was the hopeful blue of toilet bowl cleaner,” “her love felt like cold hands shaking me awake.”Īn assured debut, at once atmospheric and gritty.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Early on, Madievsky’s deliberately flat prose and druggy milieu recall Less Than Zero, and at times that Ellis-like emotional distance clangs against the themes of sexual abuse and the Holocaust she introduces. As their romance blossoms, particularly on a trip to Sasha’s homeland, the narrator begins tangling with her inner demons and (with a peculiar slowness) contemplates searching for Debbie.
A job working the late shift at an emergency room help desk puts her own drama in perspective, and it’s where she meets Sasha, a Jewish refugee from Moldova who claims psychic powers (“I’m your amulet”). But the bulk of the novel deals with her efforts to get clean and reassemble her life in the two years that follow. (Their preferred den is a bar with the ironic name Salvation.) Bad things inevitably ensue for the narrator: opioids, a miscarriage, and a fight that leads to her stabbing Debbie, who soon disappears. Chief among them is her older sister, Debbie, who introduces her to some of LA’s more dissolute haunts.
Madievsky’s coolly delivered debut has an unnamed narrator-which is fitting, since she often sees herself as a function of those around her. A first novel contemplating sisterhood, drugs, sex, and other disappointments.
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