Soft Core
Exhilarating ... Pacey and rich, full of verve, drama and detail ... Ambitious; it reads as if it is trying to wrap its arms around the abundance of experience ... Does Soft Core come together? Sort of. The final third is rougher than the opening. Subplots peter out or climax abruptly. But the last pages offer a different and more satisfying kind of crescendo — open-ended, strange, joyfully loose.
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Both lively and deeply believable ... Newell’s gifts for sensory details...and for tracing the wavy contours of human connection make her work feel like that of a glitter-bomb David Lynch ... Newell skillfully renders the exhaustion of sex work, especially the weird repetitiveness of trying to keep things exciting and new for clients ... Soft Core is more a study in feeling-tones than a tightly plotted thriller. It’s a trippy excursion down the rabbit hole into a particular substratum of culture, maintaining a tether to the
'real' world while burrowing out to the misty shoreline where it’s hard to tell horizon from sky. Each subplot sounds a distant foghorn of loneliness.
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Murkiness is one of the defining textures of the book, giving it an uncanny, almost ghostly feel. For a story about desire and longing, it is surprisingly spooky, full of stalkers, creeps and doubles ... A wonderful portrait of San Francisco ... If Soft Core does lack in resolution, the feeling you get on the final pages, when the book fades away like a fuzzy dream, makes it all A-OK.
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