If you follow news of the performing arts, you likely caught the story, early last year, of German choreographer Marco Goecke, who smeared dog feces on the face of a critic after she publicly disdained his work. Needless to say, he lost his job as ballet director at Hanover’s main opera house. That choreographer had nothing on the villain of Alexis Soloski’s first novel, Here in the Dark, who devises a complex edifice, real and electronic, in order to get revenge on a female critic who has savaged, in print, his piece of experimental theater. “It wasn’t art,” the critic opined. “It was group therapy with a pay-what-you-wish jar.”
Soloski interned at the Village Voice in the late ’90s, back when I was a senior editor at the paper. A graduate of Yale with a Ph.D. in theater from Columbia, she became the lead theater critic at the Voice; she’s now a culture reporter at The New York Times.
It’s hard to call the main character the heroine of this story — she has a tendency to faint, and has trouble getting out of her own way.
Here in the Dark, Soloski’s tour de force of dramatic invention, ups the ante on offending the sensibilities of artists. The novel postulates a play-within-a-novel that evokes Hamlet even as it centers on a tortured young woman, Vivian Parry, who numbs herself with booze and sedatives, barely eats, and casually fucks around. To tell anything more about the plot would be to spoil it, and I dare not do that. I’ve read it twice, the first time rapidly, the way drunks drink, late last year to numb the pain of a broken heart; again just now to share it with readers, perusing it as a fellow professional familiar with the challenges the main character faces. I relished its twists and turns, its lapidary language, its simultaneous cleverness and despair. “This is the self I like best,” Parry tells us. “Chill, distant, unloving and unloved.”
Set primarily in New York’s East Village in the artificially lit weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, Here in the Dark is narrated by Parry, age 32. She’s a junior critic at a local magazine who quit acting in college after experiencing a psychotic break while performing the role of Ophelia, soon after her own mother’s death. She meets her best friend, an aspiring actress named Justine, in group therapy while recovering from her misadventure; her current therapist functions primarily to keep her supplied with “downers,” the pills that “act as a safety curtain between the world and me.” It’s hard to call her the heroine of this story — she has a tendency to faint, and has trouble getting out of her own way. She’s sexually available but barely feels anything, except in dark theaters in front of shows she’s assigned to cover. She begins probing her limbs with a trick knife she’s acquired at a magic shop: “I feel nothing,” she says. “I could feel this way forever.”
Parry is both the victim and the detective in Soloski’s intricate noir plot, and the strain of that dual process eventually threatens her career, her dearest friendship, and very nearly her life. Eventually, she uncovers the identity of her nemesis, who calls her a “dumb slut,” and finally gets her revenge, though at great personal cost.
Soloski’s shapely sentences, her accurate word choices, conjure a world I know well yet see and hear, here, as if for the first time. The novel careens from one near-disaster to the next, and costs Parry a great deal, but it left me hungry to discover what Soloski will come up with next. ❖
Elizabeth Zimmer has written about dance, theater, and books for the Village Voice and other publications since 1983. She runs writing workshops for students and professionals across the country, has studied many forms of dance, and has taught in the Hollins University MFA dance program.
