Los Angeles Times Book Review

First Fiction by Mark Rozzo – Sunday, August 1, 1999

One reads Amy Sohn’s gleefully exhibitionistic “Female Trouble” column in the giveaway New York Press (a less Foucault-enamored version of the Village Voice) with equal parts astonished admiration and mounting horror at the calculated brazenness of it all. The same could be said of Sohn’s comic first novel, which appears to be a fictionalized account of her own experiences as a reporter who tends to fictionalize her daunting array of sexual (or near sexual) encounters. Sohn’s 22-year-old alter ego is Ariel Steiner; she’s Brooklyn bred, Brown educated and just barely on the near side of zaftig. After bombing as an actress, Ariel cranks out a piece about inflatable love called “The Blow-Up Boyfriend” and sends it off to the editors of New York’s City Week. Soon enough, she’s writing a weekly column about her downtown-and-dirty sex life called “run Catch Kiss” and swiftly becoming “the camp the city loved to hate.” But Ariel discovers a downside to her vocation: impotent junkies, sex in peep-show booths and flatulence in bed make good copy, but true love, alas, does not. Likewise, readers of Sohn’s novel may find Ariel’s sexual misadventures more gratifying than her attempt s to hold down a meaningful relationship.