Ruth, the narrator of Brittany Newell’s exhilarating novel “Soft Core,” is 27, adrift and living in San Francisco in a Victorian house she shares with her ex-boyfriend, a ketamine dealer. Life “felt loose, like favorite panties with the elastic stretched out. It was somehow both chaotic and boring, full of glitter and TV.”
We also come to know Ruth as Baby, the name she uses at the strip club where she works, and as Sunday, the name she assumes at a dungeon where she caters to private clients who have specific sexual fetishes and desires.
Throughout the novel, Ruth toggles between extremes: We see her in bed watching “Sex and the City” while eating beans and leftover tiramisu, as well as doing drugs with a married lawyer at his downtown condo. She moves between men, between moods, between ways of being — and strange things start to happen.
One client offers her $800 a month for unconventional sexual favors; he then asks her to delete him from his phone, but keeps paying her. Anonymous emails arrive from the address [email protected]. A new girl at the club becomes mysteriously attached to her, even stealing her signature scent: “It was called Soft Core and came in a heart-shaped bottle; it smelled, to me, of licorice and orchids, leather and plums, borrowed cigarettes, a zigzaggy purple mix.”
Dino, her first love and the owner of the house where she lives, suddenly disappears one day. Daily life begins to unravel for Ruth, and everything begins to feel like a sign or a clue.
“Soft Core” is pacey and rich, full of verve, drama and detail. Newell, the author of one other novel, “Oola,” also works as a professional dominatrix. She has a talent for drawing out the particulars of varied worlds. So many contemporary novels feel almost uninhabited, as though they are taking place in the space of pure consciousness; narrators seem to be wandering down empty hallways staring at their phones.
This novel — despite being narrated in first person by a woman who is often quite alone, alone at the point of near-breakdown, alone in moments of ecstasy — is not like that at all. Through Ruth’s eyes we see San Francisco in three dimensions — what lies behind the pink neon strip club signs, of course, but also the specific draftiness of tall Victorian houses and the oppressive silence of richer neighborhoods at night.
There are things in this book, full-fledged objects! There is sexuality, but also highly specific sensuality: sounds, tastes, smells. (Especially smells: “Her house smelled like Fruit Roll-Ups,” Ruth notes of a childhood friend. The scent of her ex-boyfriend’s last meal, “mashed plantains, garlic rice, some sort of stewed beef,” lingers after he disappears.)
In this way, “Soft Core” is ambitious; it reads as if it is trying to wrap its arms around the abundance of experience, which is often, as we say now, “too much.”
Newell also manages to draw out the gradations of Ruth’s 20s. The differences between being 24 and 27 are stark, she discovers. “It was crazy how much could happen to a girl in three years,” Ruth thinks.
This observation is both banal and profound, delivered in the perfect pitch of someone who can’t make sense of what’s changed and what hasn’t. Ruth notices the way these shadow selves — the 22- and 25-year-old versions — don’t quite go away. “I felt my old slut-self returning,” she says of one night out, unexpectedly dancing to reggaeton in a crowded bar in the Mission, light bouncing off a disco ball.
Many almost-theres and shadows float around this novel. Ruth begins to see Dino, or versions of him, everywhere. She weighs meeting up with her email correspondent. She finds herself missing the mystery man who still pays but seems to ask nothing more from her.
Sometimes these moments are wistful; other times, Newell switches into noir mode. “Nobody could find me, track me down, in this seasick city of data and drugs,” she thinks. (San Francisco is an underrated setting for noir — think “Vertigo.”) Is everything connected, we wonder, or is everything more random than we could have imagined?
Does “Soft Core” come together? Sort of. The final third is rougher than the opening. Subplots peter out or climax abruptly. But the last pages offer a different and more satisfying kind of crescendo — open-ended, strange, joyfully loose. On the verge of leaving one phase of her life and entering another, Ruth thinks about the web of people who have been flitting in and out of her world, and certain mysteries do seem solved.
“You were never alone,” she tells herself. “You just had to know where to look.”
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