PERMISSION

A burned-out writer hits rock bottom and eventually reinvents his life in this novel.

The narrator of Kristal’s tale leaves the slough of Los Angeles at the outset of the book in hopes of striking it big in the heyday of Ronald Reagan–era New York City. There, he lives the life of a high-profile freelance writer rubbing elbows with a seedy but glamorous set. “My friends were seldom writers or artists,” he reflects, “but rather a phylum of those I worked for: commodities traders, junk bond dealers, all of them arrogant, brainless, materialistic.” He also has a series of lovers, “high-strung girls, ferocious drinkers, all with hard, tiring jobs that owned a weird insubstantiality: focus group leaders, time buyers, food stylists.” Only belatedly do readers learn that the narrator has had a wife this whole time in New York, a woman who inherited a “blue-chip portfolio that paid enough in dividends to float a vie de la boheme; and the lack of a need to work had leached into the groundwater of her emotional conflict.” Despite her initial resistance (“I’m not leaving” becomes something of a refrain throughout the story), the narrator and his wife ultimately move back to LA, where the “consuming reality” is that everything had to sell, “and if people weren’t buying your thing, you bloody well fixed it until they did.” The narrator is nakedly ambitious. “God knows I wanted to make it,” he confesses. “I was dying to see a hideous flash picture of myself, snapped at an opening, on the back page of Variety.”

The return to LA precipitates many descents for the narrator and a key change in his wife’s life. She starts going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. But the narrator’s efforts in the script-doctoring business feel uninspired (“The work might lack originality,” he allows, “but one sustained a career and, no less valuably, a reputation”). And as his marriage dramatically tumbles into savage antagonism, the narrator falls into a $5,000-a-month addiction to sex workers and cocaine. Kristal writes this dramatic and seedy deterioration with incredible vibrancy and linguistic virtuosity (“Think of a December night,” goes one passage in which the narrator fondly remembers his initial experiences with cocaine, “when the crisp, clear air rings each streetlight with an aureole, the vodka pours thick and frigid and arrives in a crystal glass, when a woman’s smile is bright, her laugh musical, and every scrape and snap has a satisfying bite: cocaine at its best is all that”). The book’s protracted anatomy of drug- and alcohol-fueled deconstruction is immensely insightful and powerful. When the narrator complacently observes that “one cannot build a useful fiction on top of a destructive lie,” readers will genuinely wince at the self-delusion. And when he leaves his wife and meets a supportive woman named Jessica, those same readers will cheer. The dissection of a disintegrating marriage in these pages is unsettlingly vivid, as is the portrait of degradation brought on by addiction. The fact that the narrator somehow remains likable throughout is as remarkable as it is unexpected.

A searingly moving picture of a personal, professional, and marital crackup.