Soft Core

Newell (Oola) delivers a crackerjack novel of a sex worker who comes undone after her ex-boyfriend’s disappearance. Ruth, the 27-year-old narrator, mainly uses her stripper name, Baby. She rates herself a seven out of 10, and her life feels “loose, like favorite panties with the elastic stretched out.” She lives in San Francisco with her ex Dino, a ketamine dealer with a dangerous side (he owns nunchucks) and a soft side (he loves Dolly Parton, secretly wears women’s lingerie, and dotes on his rescue dogs). Their breakup was amicable, and they remain close. When Dino goes missing, Baby tries not to panic, remembering how he’d once told her, “If something ever happens to me... don’t call the cops. Just sit tight and be cool.” She takes another job as a dominatrix to fill the time, and in her sleep deprivation, she starts hallucinating Dino’s face on strangers. She’s also rattled by a new dancer at the club, the prettier Emeline, who copies her in unnerving ways, first by borrowing a pair of her panties and wearing them every night on stage, then by using the same perfume. Newell makes the most of Baby’s unreliable narration, conveying her deteriorating mental state as she struggles to hold onto her sense of self, and the wild ride is bolstered by striking prose and memorable imagery. It’s a stellar entry in the literature of unhinged women, up there with Mona Awad’s Bunny. (Feb.)