Review | ‘All-Night Pharmacy’ is a California noir novel for the 21st century

She is Madievsky’s protagonist, though she is too passive to qualify as a heroine. “Being a person didn’t come naturally to me the way it seemed to for others,” she says. Having just graduated from high school, she waits, like a child’s doll, for her enrollment in a scheme of events too cosmic and uncontrollable to be called a future. When she is not having bad sex with her boyfriend, she trails after her older sister Debbie, who is more charismatic than her but not necessarily more destructive.

“Spending time with my sister,” the narrator announces at the start, “was like buying acid off a guy you met on the bus. You never knew if it would end with you, euphoric … or coming to in a gas station bathroom.” This is only a half-metaphor, as Debbie does, in reality, ply the narrator with a bounty of obscurely sourced drugs. The sisters do most of them at Salvation, an old Christian bookstore turned bar, where they lie to strangers and barrel toward blackouts. In the process, Debbie takes on almost demonic proportions, behaving like a capricious pre-Christian deity. She insists on picking out the narrator’s clothes; she abandons her during a surprise miscarriage; she has a laugh like a “manhole cover scraping across asphalt” and an “extra canine tooth.”

The power of the older sister resides in her surplus store of information. With the mandate of birth order, she arrives early to scope out reality, imperiously communicating her findings to those siblings unlucky enough to follow her. The older sister knows things about the world, one’s parents, maybe even sex. For the narrator, this arrangement is compelling because her family, a group of Soviet Jewish exiles, has an especially distorted relation to knowledge. Their mother is a paranoiac who thinks “everyone [is] KGB.” Meanwhile, her grandmother is a wounded receptacle of lore, conjuring Old World memories that land as present-day accusations. She speaks of her “own father dragged out of the house and shot,” of her mother forced into a collective farm. “She ruined her hands digging for radishes,” grandmother says, serving the narrator a plate of the vegetable at tea.

Debbie is the closest thing in the family to a caretaker, though her care comes to feel like an umbilical cord around the neck. When she disappears partway into the novel, she leaves the narrator hooked on pills, determined not to look for her.

Debbie’s departure comes as a slant blessing to the reader, too, who has had to countenance the book’s many rhapsodic statements about the sisters’ dynamic. “Being Debbie’s sister was obliterating,” we are told. Later: “It was only when I followed Debbie down a rabbit hole that ended in scar tissue and the deforestation of my remaining dopamine that my want quieted.” Madievsky’s narrator unfortunately spends more time poeticizing than proving Debbie’s charm. Many of the sisters’ moments together — the portentous, aforementioned rabbit holes — are only glossed in paraphrase: “When I think about that night,” goes one representative paragraph. “I remember the champagne-bubbles feeling in my stomach … Debbie slurring to Ronnie … People buying us drinks all night.” There are many sentences like these, dashed on the page as gestures toward a scene, and they have the feel of someone cursorily tossing out plates in a hurry to set the table.

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For this reason, the grit in this novel sometimes feels unearned. Though the narrator professes that the patrons of Salvation are her “brothers and sisters,” these minor characters are rarely heard from. We see only their occupational outlines: “You’d meet computer programmers pretending to be social workers … and skater kids claiming to be radiologists.” The bar’s “skeletal” hipsters and women “with blue hair” are signifiers of addiction and dysfunction rather than observed characters; rarely do they get lines of dialogue, let alone personalities. They may have been passing strangers to the narrator, but bars are places of social exchange, and even strangers are people.

It feels as if Madievsky hurtles past these figures in a determination to reach the climactic peaks of her novel. The narrator soon meets Sasha, a Jewish refugee from Moldova who claims to possess psychic abilities. The two begin a relationship, and here the book, as if in deference to the dilatory experience of new love, slows and becomes more carefully, gorgeously rendered. But Sasha has her own leverage; like Debbie, she coyly guards what she knows. It is only when the narrator leaves behind both women that she finally becomes a whole person. One wishes Madievsky had bestowed this privilege on the book’s other characters as well.

Zoe Hu is a PhD student in the English department at the CUNY Graduate Center.