Alexis Soloski, a theater critic for the New York Times, has written a novel about a theater critic, but if that’s the lure, beware: “Here in the Dark” (Flatiron Books, 256 pages) is more Dashiell Hammett than Dorothy Parker, the central character as much Sam Spade as Addison DeWitt.
Vivian Parry is deeply flawed: self-destructive, antisocial, hardboiled. She drinks too much, pops pills, and narrates her story with lots of caustic quips and slick similes (“He lectured me in a voice like a leaking faucet.”) She manipulates men, sexually and otherwise – and is so “unfeeling,” as she herself puts it, that “it’s more or less my brand by now…”
And, starting about half-way through this genre novel, Vivian becomes a full-time sleuth, taking vacation days from the magazine where she writes reviews to go undercover in disguise to solve the mystery of the missing person and the dead body, both of which she encountered in the first half of the book – even while she gets threatening handwritten notes thrust anonymously under her door.
So, no, we don’t get a thinly veiled inside look at the Times’s theater coverage, or a how-to about reviewing. We don’t finally get a theater critic character who is a fleshed-out, sympathetic human being to counteract the stereotype of the cold if witty cynic Addison DeWitt from “All About Eve” or the insufferable martinet Sheridan Whiteside from “The Man Who Came To Dinner” – both of which Vivian watches with great satisfaction. If anything, the character feeds an assumption about critics made by many a theater artist whose egos have been bruised by a negative review: She is a failed actress, having had a breakdown during college that landed her in a psych ward and ended her aspiring career as a performer.
Yet, for all the twists and turns of a typical crime novel — involving a private eye, a distrustful cop, the missing man’s distraught Russian fiancé and her fat gangster father, a hidden flash-drive, a secret mastermind, and a reasonably clever if highly improbable resolution — “Here in the Dark” is awash in the critical profession and the theatrical arts.
Much of this consists of droll throwaway lines with no elaboration, largely similes thrown like little milk bones to her likely theater-loving readership:
“The lock’s as unyielding as a Greek tragedy.”
“I need more men in my life like Timon of Athens needs a sixth act.”
“…I’d rather give a spirited defense of the female characters of Arthur Miller than clink glasses with Raj…”
“To say that I value my privacy is like suggesting Strindberg had occasional girl trouble.” (At another point she says she prefers Strindberg over Ibsen, for which she also doesn’t elaborate.)
Occasionally there is a bit more meat worked into these lines: “Shaw said that as long as more people would pay to see a naked body than a naked brain, drama would languish. But even Shaw might have paid to see Charlie.” (The novel’s epitaph is a quote from Shaw: “The critical profession, in fact, is cruel in its nature, and demands for its efficient discharge an inhuman person like myself.”) Charlie, the nicest of the men that Vivian beds, heads a company that makes weather effects for stage shows; Vivian meets him because she is writing about his company; his demonstration of the mist- and fog- and snow-making machines is one of the few scenes in the book explicitly connected to the making of theater. (Another is an amusing account of an experimental play that depends entirely on audience interaction, which Vivian adamantly resists.)
It’s in Vivian’s interactions with her editor Roger, and in the few moments she talks about reviewing, when we’re most able to tap into Soloski’s own critical expertise and (likely) sensibility.
Vivian is a “junior critic” looking for her editor Roger to promote her, or as she puts it, “angling for the magazine’s chief critic’s job with every quip and censure” in her reviews. She talks at one point about “returning to my laptop to translate the experience of the play I saw last night—an early Fornés drama—into argument and image and evidenced claim.” At a Christmas party with Roger’s family, he gives her a copy of Kenneth Tynan’s Curtains, which she calls ” one of the great collections of theater criticism by one of theater criticism’s many terrible men.”
“’Do you know the motto he used to have above his desk?’” Roger asks her.
“I do. But I shake my head. I let him say it.
“‘Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds.’”
There is little outright critical laceration in “Here in the Dark,” but a spot-on poke or two. She talks about a collection of plays she’s reading by Hrotsvitha, “a medieval nun who wrote tragedies and comedies of martyrs and whores, one of which I am set to review tonight. From what I have read so far, the good girls get tortured and mutilated, the bad ones die peacefully or not at all.” (Hrotsvitha was introduced to New York theatergoers this year through “Mary Gets Hers,” Emma Horwitz’s Off-Broadway adaptation of a Hrotsvitha play.)
Putting aside the theatrical references, “Here in the Dark” is most satisfying in its descriptions of the East Village neighborhood where it’s mostly set (where Vivian lives in a fifth floor walk-up apartment), and in the banter with the vivid cast of characters in Vivian’s orbit, especially Vivian’s best (only) friend Justine. Justine is an actress, which would normally make Vivian rule her out for friendship, but Vivian has given her a pass, since they met beforehand, in the group therapy sessions that their college mandated after their respective psych ward stays.
Vivian herself feels too harshly depicted to be credible, despite some stabs at explaining her misanthropic detachment as a response to the death of her mother, a clinical diagnosis of “depersonalization disorder,” and even a physical illness, “neuropathic postural tachycardia syndrome” (POTS), which causes her to faint easily. It feels as if she’s been fabricated to fit genre requirements, or perhaps to co-opt the all-too-common prejudice toward critics among members of the theater community. The saving grace of such an off-putting characterization is to make the case for theater that much stronger: If even someone like her can find solace in it…
As Vivian says:
“Warmth is not my forte. As far as the rich palette of human experience goes, I live on a gray scale. Aristotle said that drama was an imitation of an action. I am, of necessity, an imitation of myself—a sharp smile, an acid joke, an abyss where a woman should be. For a decade and more I have allowed myself only this lone role, a minor one: Vivian Parry, actor’s scourge and girl-about-town. I don’t play it particularly well.
“Except when I’m seeing theater, good theater. When I’m in the dark, at that safe remove from daily life, I feel it all—rage, joy, surprise. Until the houselights come on and break it all apart again, I am alive.”
