All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky
Editorial Assistant Book Club: August 2023
After you read enough debut novels you start to recognize some common hallmarks. The narrators usually come unnamed or lightly pseudonym’d. The encounters are random and fragmented, with an acid-trip-like quality. Substance abuse and adolescent traumas are common. Enigmatic, dangerous friends and/or lovers hang over the protagonists like drenched raincoats.
It is hard to tell how much of Ruth Madievsky’s debut All-Night Pharmacy is autobiographical—personally, I believe in not doing much off-the-page research when reading fiction—but the novel certainly starts out in the mode that is reminiscent of autofiction. We meet our young narrator fleeing a troubled home at eighteen. To do that, she falls into a not-very-good relationship of convenience. The narrator’s equally troubled older sister Debbie drags the narrator into a life of drugs (pills, in this case—a growing commonality across our book club books), and they frequent a dive bar almost-too-ironically named Salvation. If you’ve read any fictional, or lightly fictionalized accounts of addiction, then the grime covered lens of discomfort will be recognizable to you in the first hundred pages of All-Night Pharmacy. Drugs have a tendency to fuel stories where progressively wild events take place, which seem like less and less fun as you go. A lot of first-time writers, having seemingly experienced the intensity of drug use themselves, first or secondhand, understandably feel the need to write about it.
It is not a surprise that many debut authors start with themselves. Not only does the adage “write what you know” describe a natural desire to express something about one’s own experience, but it is also a practical choice for someone starting out. Take setting, for example: it’s much easier to start writing a story if you can put the action in rooms and environments you already know. If you’re from Ohio but for some reason you decide that you want to set your novel in Oslo, a place you’ve never been, then you’re going to have to expend a whole lot of energy researching every detail of how Scandinavians decorate their homes just so you can have your mother and daughter characters have a passing conversation in the kitchen. Extrapolate this example and you can see the allure of autobiographical fiction as a starting place, and why first-time novelists almost always start closer to the real events of their life: the people they know; the places they’ve been; things that have happened to them directly; the person they are.
Reading All-Night Pharmacy reminded me that a writer’s ability isn’t the only thing that determines if a novel works well. While ability is a prerequisite to write something worthwhile, it isn’t the end all, be all. There’s still the author’s choice of what story to tell and how much time and space to give that perspective or setting or narrative. Many of us have come across a book by writer we love, one who is unquestionably great, in which the author chooses the wrong story or mode and the resulting book comes out as a well-polished, well-executed version of something that doesn’t feel quite alive. A writer can chose to focus on the wrong aspect of a story or make a poor choice from the outset that sets a novel of course. That may be choosing to write a story in a fantasy land outside of the writer’s normal realism; or to write a domestic drama that has a lot of clever observations but no sense of urgency; or focusing intensely on a character’s profession at the expense of the narrative (all of these are real examples from my reading from highly respected authors). But very often you see this happen with debut fiction because of the autobiographical slant most first novels have, not every intense personal experience translates into a equally as captivating story.
About 100 pages into All-Night Pharmacy, a surprising thing happened. Here, the narrator’s sister leaves the picture and the narrator gets sober and starts a romantic relationship with a woman. This considerable shift breathes new life into the book even though the level of writing—which is consistently good throughout—doesn’t get any better. All of the funnily macabre lines that jumped out at me came precisely around the time the narrator starts to clean up her act. Strangely, the sobriety, relationship, and generational family story elements—what one might call the “quiet” parts of storytelling, as opposed to violence, drug use, and depravity—are more engaging, wittier, and fresher. Here are some lines that started popping almost immediately when the narrative changed:
“New Year’s came and went with all of the fanfare of a menstrual cycle.” (113)
“My chest was hammering, bathing me in warm blood, and I felt I was having what I could only describe as a ‘good heart attack.’” (119)
“Criticism is still a cousin of attention.” (136);
“We picked our clothes off the bathroom floor. I wondered why the tub was wet when we got here. Why, without even a folding chair, the apartment didn’t feel empty. ‘The past isn’t a bag of kittens you can dump in a lake,’ my grandmother might have said” (213)
A while ago I wrote about what the most difficult kind of book to write well is, and one might do a similar exercise with what kind of stories are difficult to write and make feel original. Up there in the rankings would be addiction stories, which, while harrowing and singular on a personal level, collectively are an experience that is sadly fairly common and have been written about a lot. Maybe it is unfair, but this raises the bar for new writers of these stories. Writers who enter the fray have to contend with not only the great works before them but a whole set of tropes, cliches, and a high baseline of familiarity that readers have. The result is that these upsetting, weird, and shocking stories become somewhat numbed over time. The themes of addiction and toxic relationships in particular take on a rather familiar patter—desperation, depravity, disassociation, and lose their effect, even if you can feel in the author’s writing that they felt them acutely and specifically.
(Something similar happens in memoir, a cousin to autofiction [in the above link, I rated memoir the hardest kind of nonfiction to succeed in, for similar reasons as autofiction being difficult]. In memoir, the worst possible experiences, such as a fatal illness or war or loss of a love one, become dulled when told over and over again. While it doesn’t dull the actual reality of the experience—many people have had an upsetting night out, felt the intense pain of addiction, or the experienced a shocking and spontaneous moment of violence—it’s increasingly hard to translate it into prose in a new and interesting way.)
The last two-thirds of All-Night Pharmacy are very good. Not because they are any less personal—sobriety; the queer relationship; Jewish grandparents from the former Soviet Union—but because the specific experiences they might draw from are less canonized and worked over by literature and other forms of storytelling. Reading about the narrator’s concrete steps toward getting sober has a lived-in quality that was engrossing as the other side of addiction we don’t often get examples of. Watching the relationship unfold, ebb-and-flow, as the narrator and her girlfriend travel to Moldova to contend with the ghosts of their ancestors together, was more electrifying than the hospital visits and sordid events of the early chapters. While I sympathize on a formal level with the need for Act I to setup the events for Act II and III, Ruth Madievsky proves in the latter half of the book, especially, to be an exciting new writer and one well worth reading.