Ruth Madievsky’s novel "All-Night Pharmacy" is a type of California neo-neo-noir, revitalizing the genre's saturated nightmares for the 21st century. Its Los Angeles is still haunted by femme fatales and political corruption, although the old glamour is diminishing. Here, the notable locations are not the Boulevard or the Hills but anonymous emergency rooms where drifters wait instead of wander — and our unnamed, 18-year-old protagonist repeatedly finds herself stranded after poorly planned escapades.
She is Madievsky's main character, although she is too passive to be considered a heroine. "Being a person didn't come naturally to me the way it seemed to for others," she admits. Having just graduated from high school, she waits, like a doll, for her enrollment in a series of events too immense and uncontrollable to be labeled as a future. When she is not engaging in unsatisfying sexual encounters with her boyfriend, she follows her older sister Debbie, who is more charismatic but not necessarily more self-destructive.
"Spending time with my sister," the narrator declares at the beginning, "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 partial metaphor, as Debbie does, in reality, supply the narrator with an abundance of obscurely obtained drugs. The sisters consume most of them at Salvation, an old Christian bookstore turned bar, where they deceive strangers and teeter on the edge of blackout. In the process, Debbie takes on an almost demonic presence, behaving like a capricious pre-Christian deity. She insists on selecting the narrator's clothes; she abandons her during a surprise miscarriage; she possesses a laugh reminiscent of "a manhole cover scraping across asphalt" and an "additional canine tooth."
The older sister's power lies in her wealth of information. With the authority of birth order, she arrives early to explore reality, imperiously sharing her discoveries with those unfortunate siblings who come after her. The older sister possesses knowledge about the world, one's parents, and perhaps even sex. For the narrator, this dynamic is captivating because her family, a group of Soviet Jewish exiles, has an especially distorted relationship with knowledge. Their mother is paranoid, believing "everyone [is] KGB." Meanwhile, her grandmother is a wounded vessel of stories, summoning memories from the Old World that manifest as contemporary accusations. She speaks of her "own father dragged out of the house and shot," of her mother being forced into a collective farm. "She ruined her hands digging for radishes," grandmother says, serving the narrator a plate of the vegetable during tea.
Debbie is the closest thing in the family to a caregiver, although her care begins to feel like an umbilical cord strangling the narrator. When she disappears halfway through the novel, she leaves the narrator addicted to pills and determined not to search for her.
Debbie's departure also serves as a small blessing to the reader, who has had to endure the book's numerous rhapsodic descriptions of the sisters' relationship. "Being Debbie's sister was overwhelming," we are informed. Later: "It was only when I followed Debbie down a rabbit hole that led to scar tissue and the depletion of my remaining dopamine that my desire quieted." Unfortunately, Madievsky's narrator spends more time romanticizing than substantiating Debbie's charm. Many of the sisters' moments together — the significant, aforementioned rabbit holes — are only briefly summarized: "When I think about that night," reads one typical paragraph. "I remember the champagne-bubbles feeling in my stomach ... Debbie slurring to Ronnie ... People buying us drinks all night." There are numerous sentences like these, hastily thrown onto the page as mere gestures towards a scene, and they give the impression of someone hurriedly setting the table by casually tossing out plates.
For this reason, the grit in this novel sometimes feels undeserved. Although the narrator claims that the patrons of Salvation are her "brothers and sisters," these minor characters are seldom given a voice