Like Being Killed

Like its narrator--overweight, overeducated, cynical 25-year-old East Village junkie Ilyana Meyerovich--Miller's debut is a downer too smart to write off, a ramshackle, sentimental novel distinguished by a voice full of vibrant, self-loathing intelligence. We first meet Ilyana at her friend Gerry's morose, coke- and heroine-snorting 33rd birthday. The party, which ends in Gerry's death by overdose, breaks up their druggy clique and prompts Ilyana to get serious about her life's work--not her day job, temping (ironically) for a publisher of self-help books--but her vocation: self-annihilation through drugs and masochistic sex. On the way down, she recounts the travails that have brought her to this pass: chiefly, a lonely childhood in a miserable, working-class Brooklyn family and a wrecked friendship (beautifully rendered by Miller) with her former roommate, big, square, loving, ""Ivory Soap"" girl Susie Lyons. Before Miller halts Ilyana's plunge toward suicide (as if by magic, sad to say) and reunites Ilyana with Susie, she shows a great, erratic talent doomed by the redemptive machinery of the up-from-addiction genre. Despite the weak ending and an embarrassment of half-baked Big Themes (Ilyana's lost Jewishness, the mental illness that may run in her Holocaust-haunted family, her childhood suffering at the hands of reckless doctors), Miller's literate, high-Romantic irony, psychological acuity and keen observations of the rickety friendships that addicts cultivate all set her apart from the smack pack. At heart she's more Thomas DeQuincy than Luke Davies or Irvine Welsh; her wonderful Ilyana is one of the more memorable misfits in recent fiction. (Aug.)