Book

July 1999

by Scott Markwell

New York columnist Sohn dives headlong into Generation X’s search for sex, love and commitment. Her protagonist, Ariel Steiner, fresh out of Brown University, ahs returned to New York City to restart an acting career and look for a boyfriend. While performing in a semi-pornographic performance piece masquerading as a musical, she discovers a knack for writing salacious, if not filthy, scenarios of her love life and winds up writing a sex column for a weekly city newspaper. Ariel quickly finds herself the poster girl for a sexually liberated yet emotionally numb reader base. Sohn’s novel mixes keen observational humor with sexually explicit first-person narrative to expose a naïve romantic searching for love and monogamy while writing a column that has no time for either. Using an ironic, voyeuristic style, Sohn attacks a voyeuristic culture consumed with sleaze rather than substance. Although thin on revelations, the novel delivers laughs and an accurate portrait of romantic angst in the big city.