CHEMICAL PINK

A Los Angeles–set first novel about the obsessive cult of women’s bodybuilding.

When bodybuilding champion May leaves him, Charles Worthington, a wealthy southern California eccentric, patrols the Venice gyms for a new woman to sponsor. Charles is something new in fiction: a serial sculptor, owner, and destroyer of women’s bodies. Into his gym life, and into the laboratory of his sponsorship, comes Aurora Jeanine Johnson, a single mother from the Deep South, and between them there occurs something of the telegraphy of sculptor and stone. Soon Aurora isn’t just lifting and training as per Charles’s instructions, but she’s also eating, drinking, and injecting whatever she’s told to. Charles chisels Aurora from hard-body wannabe to comic book superhero to sex toy—the object of Charles’s fantasies. At first, that’s an easy enough price for Aurora to pay. She’s always aspired to a bodybuilding physique, and Charles’s subsidies enable her to bring her teenaged daughter Amy to L.A. as well. But, like her body, the price Aurora pays grows in increments. The demands of the gym floor, the regimen of the kitchen, and the humiliation of the bedroom take their toll. Under all the growth hormones, Aurora’s clitoris enlarges as her voice drops. Meanwhile, Charles’s attraction to manly women develops into a compulsion for Doughdee, a black dominatrix with shoulders linebacker wide, while a resentful and neglected Amy wobbles on trendy cowboy boots that her thickening frame can’t master. Arnoldi shows herself to be an impeccable, and sometimes lyrical, authority on the world she describes, providing litanies of the obsessions that gym rats develop—the work-out regimens, the growth drugs, the nauseating side-effects—all juxtaposed with fastidious descriptions of Charles’s sexual performances, where thrusts are counted like weightlifters’ reps.

The occasionally flabby prose and muscle-bound characterization undercut the impact of an exposé that’s equal parts a Pumping Iron-documentary and a Harold Robbins shock-me please.