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A Novel
by Brittany Newell
Book Reviewed by:A young woman's madcap search for her missing ex-boyfriend takes her into the sexual underground in Brittany Newell's savage, tender Soft Core.
Ruth is lost. She's living in a drafty Victorian with her ex-boyfriend Dino, a ketamine dealer with a lingerie habit, overdosing on television and regretting her master's degree. When she starts dancing at a strip club, she becomes Baby Blue, seductress of crypto bros, outcasts, and old lovers alike. Plunged into this swirling underworld of beautiful women, fast cash, ungodly hours, and strangers' secrets, Baby's grip on reality begins to loosen. She is sure she can handle it―until one autumn morning when Dino disappears without a trace.
Thus begins a nocturnal quest for the one she still loves―through the misty hills of San Francisco; in dive bars and bus depots; at the BDSM dungeon where she takes a part-time gig. Along the way, she meets Simon, a recluse who pays her for increasingly bizarre favors; a philosophizing suicide fetishist named Nobody; and Emeline, the beautiful and balletic new hire who reminds Baby of someone ...
A brutally funny, propulsive story of power, fantasy, love, and loss, Brittany Newell's Soft Core is an ode to the heartbroken and unhinged, to those whose appetites lead them astray. It is a hallucinogenic romp about a girl coming undone, whose longing for friendship, romance, and revenge will take her over the edge and back again.
1.
I had been stripping for three weeks before I met Simon. A lot had happened in those three weeks: I changed my stage name (from Daisy to Baby), lost a hundred-dollar bill in the bathroom, developed ketchup-hued bruises on my ass cheeks and thighs, got locked out of the Victorian I shared with my ex-boyfriend, Dino.
Ruth! Dino shouted, coming to the door. Is that you?
No, I shouted back, it's Baby. My arms hurt from carrying my three pairs of shoes.
I don't know a Baby, he sighed, but I could hear him fiddling with the locks. Finally, he let me in and I collapsed on the couch, his dogs swirling around us. Dino eyed me. Good night or bad?
I dropped my bag to the floor and money spilled out, along with balled-up burger wrappers and wrecked lipsticks. It's relative, I said, burrowing into the couch.
Dino was on his way out. He was a ketamine dealer who worked even weirder hours than me. We'd broken up at...
It turns out employers aren't exactly clamoring to hire humanities grads with little professional experience. So after finishing her master's degree, Ruth pivots to a career in a decidedly less academic field: stripping. This book casts sex work in a refreshingly realistic and humanizing light. It's not a morality tale. Ruth and her coworkers are not victims in need of rescue, but that doesn't mean they entirely love their jobs. Sex work is depicted as a job like any other, and sex workers as complex human beings with a variety of motivations. Soft Core is sharply witty at some points and quietly heartbreaking at others. Ruth is a likeable character made all the more relatable by her flaws, and by the end of the story she feels like an old friend...continued
Full Review
(818 words)
(Reviewed by Jillian Bell).
Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth and Mostly Dead Things
Soft Core is a beautiful fever dream, a slippery, captivating pleasure, a love story stuffed inside a wadded nylon stocking. It's a novel that wants to get close to you. It wants to bite your neck; it's the actual promise of a hickey. I can't remember the last book I read that was even half as tender. I ate it up. Michelle Tea, author of Black Wave
Brittany Newell's prose is too elegant to be called raw, but the oomph, the heart, makes everything feel so real. I love this world and this narrator, the risks she takes, the story she tells, simple yet so seductive and just teeming with aliveness. Nicola Dinan, author of Bellies
Soft Core drew me in like a whirlpool—a wild spin into loneliness and desire. Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection
Soft Core is not just a book but a fully realized and highly seductive way of life—louche, fleshy, and freestyle. Brittany Newell, a hoarder of details and perfumer of moods, has written an existential dual-mystery that's as carefully structured as it is emotionally urgent, like a ransom note in sonnet form. Deeply impressive and fun as hell!In the novel Soft Core, protagonist Ruth works at a San Francisco club as a stripper, a profession with a long history in the United States. The first striptease acts in America were part of vaudeville shows at carnivals and burlesque theatres around the turn of the twentieth century. One early "disrobing act" by a trapeze performer was famously captured on film in 1901. The road to stripping's current place in U.S. culture has been a long and bumpy one. Here are some of the milestones along the way:
1925: Minsky's Burlesque, a club in New York City that had become famous for its striptease performances, is raided by police. Minsky's was known as the first burlesque club to feature a runway, allowing performers to ...
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