i’ts been a long tym that i’m not open my tumbler hehehehe…
One wouldn’t expect a lot of squeaky-clean characters with a name like Toxicology, but in her eleventh book, multitalented author Jessica Hagedorn confronts the reader with the most washed-up bunch of users she’s ever created. Set in modern-day New York City, the story starts its winding narrative with Mimi Smith, a one-hit filmmaker who laments her failed career as she tries to cope with her derelict teenage daughter, a relapsing alcoholic brother, a missing cousin and the disappearance of her drug-dealing lover. Rounding out this desperate crew is her next-door neighbor, a cocaine-addled octogenarian has-been writer named Eleanor Delacroix, who is mourning the loss of her partner to cancer. With all these sinewy relationships in place, the plot points are simple: Eleanor must write a new story to read at an event to which she’s been invited to perform, and Mimi attempts to track down her missing cousin as she contemplates ideas for new films.
The details are burdensome, but the real success of Toxicology is the writing that comes once this messy web is laid out. Hagedorn’s prose is grotesque and lurid, slipping in and out of different points of view in the heady style of storytelling that readers have come to expect from this poet and playwright. Rich sentences mimic the druggy fog the characters are lost in as well as the cinematic nature of Mimi’s aspirations. Both subject matter and writing style would make a hell of a movie.
Although the story is framed around Mimi, the real tragic hero is Eleanor: arthritic, lonely and full of cocaine. Through the elderly neighbor’s attempted comeback, Hagedorn expertly touches on the themes and characters she’s always wrangling with: sorry people seemingly removed from one another who struggle with the same difficulties and ultimately search for the same acceptance.
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