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Summary
Summary
*A NATIONAL BESTSELLER*
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction
Finalist for the California Book Awards
Rachel Kushner meets David Lynch in this fever dream of an LA novel about a young woman who commits a drunken act of violence just before her sister vanishes without a trace
On the night of her high school graduation, a young woman follows her older sister Debbie to Salvation, a Los Angeles bar patronized by energy healers, aspiring actors, and all-around misfits. After the two share a bag of unidentified pills, the evening turns into a haze of sensual and risky interactions--nothing unusual for two sisters bound in an incredibly toxic relationship. Our unnamed narrator has always been under the spell of the alluring and rebellious Debbie and, despite her own hesitations, she has always said yes to nights like these. That is, until Debbie disappears.
Falling deeper into the life she cultivated with her sister, our narrator gets a job as an emergency room secretary where she steals pills to sell on the side. Cue Sasha, a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union who arrives at the hospital claiming to be a psychic tasked with acting as the narrator's spiritual guide. The nature of this relationship evolves and blurs, a kaleidoscope of friendship, sex, mysticism, and ambiguous power dynamics.
With prose pulsing like a neon sign, Ruth Madievsky's All-Night Pharmacy is an intoxicating portrait of a young woman consumed with unease over how a person should be. As she attempts sobriety and sexual embodiment, she must decide whether to search for her estranged sister, or allow her to remain a relic of the past.
Author Notes
RUTH MADIEVSKY's writing appears in The Atlantic , the Los Angeles Times , Harper's Bazaar , The Cut , GQ , Guernica , Kenyon Review , and elsewhere. She is the author of a poetry collection, Emergency Brake , and a Tin House Summer Workshop scholar. She cofounded the Cheburashka Collective, a community of women and nonbinary writers whose identities have been shaped by immigration from the Soviet Union to the United States. Originally from Moldova, she lives in Los Angeles, where she works as an HIV and primary care clinical pharmacist.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Poet Madievsky (Emergency Brake) makes her fiction debut with an electric tale of two sisters. "Spending time with my sister, Debbie, was like buying acid off a guy you met on the bus," recounts the unnamed 18-year-old narrator, the result being either "euphoric" or "coming to in a gas station bathroom." They've grown up in an unstable home, their father absent and their mother receiving a "kaleidoscope of diagnoses." Along the way, the acquiescent narrator learns to defer to the older, imperious Debbie: "I didn't like who I was when I was with her, but I didn't like myself any other time either." After hanging out with Debbie and doing drugs at a dive bar, the narrator develops an addiction to prescription pills. She also becomes codependent with Debbie, a dynamic that comes to a head with the narrator stabbing Debbie. The latter survives, then disappears. Afterward, the narrator finds admin work in an emergency room, where she meets and falls in love with Sasha, a queer Jewish refugee from Moldova who claims to be the narrator's spiritual guardian ("She had all of Debbie's larger-than-lifeness, but without the dangerous edge or the bitter comedown," the narrator reflects of Sasha). Madievsky renders her protagonist's search for selfhood vividly and viscerally, resulting in a coming-of-age story that radiates like a Lynchian fever dream. Agent: Mina Hamedi, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (July)
Kirkus Review
A first novel contemplating sisterhood, drugs, sex, and other disappointments. Madievsky's coolly delivered debut has an unnamed narrator--which is fitting, since she often sees herself as a function of those around her. Chief among them is her older sister, Debbie, who introduces her to some of LA's more dissolute haunts. (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. But the bulk of the novel deals with her efforts to get clean and reassemble her life in the two years that follow. 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"). 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. 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. (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." An assured debut, at once atmospheric and gritty. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Debut author Madievsky introduces us to the unnamed narrator at age 18 as she is living under the sway of her dangerously magnetic older sister, Debbie, in Los Angeles. Drug-fueled nights at their favorite bar, Salvation, give her the excuse to avoid thinking about her future, her past with her unstable mother, and her sexuality after she falls into a safe if unexciting relationship with a good-natured guy. The hazy fun comes to an end when she has a miscarriage and Debbie abandons her at the hospital, causing a rift between the two. Debbie does a brief stint in rehab, but after she checks out, the sisters have a fight and Debbie disappears. Left to her own devices, the narrator opts out of college, eventually taking a job as a receptionist at a hospital. One day charismatic psychic Sasha waltzes into her life, claiming she's come to help the narrator, and in doing so, unlocks her repressed attraction to women. Tackling topics as wide-ranging as grooming, addiction to drugs and people, sexuality, and Shoah grief, Madievsky weaves a compelling coming-of-age yarn.
