Rating: 
Summary: Cultural fallout from the Bret Easton Ellis generation...
Review: Small wonder that the NYTimes praised this little tome- it's an elitist valentine to the city and hipster culture that spawned its own elitist ennui. Marlowe writes decent prose, but her pinned-pupil navelgazing gets taxing real quick, as does the irritatingly unfocused pseudo-philosophy that comprises around a third of the book. Marlowe seems like the sort of person you'd try desperately to avoid at a cocktail party (or in a cop spot, for that matter): a narcissistic, world-weary poseur, witlessly droning on about her Harvard education and her uber-hip (but ill-defined) underground ties, and wearing her psychic track marks like a badge of worth. Yes, it is formatted unusually, and there are some surprises within the little anecdotes that make up the dictionary entries. It's also an atypical way to approach addiction - from within, from a thoroughly middle-class standpoint - and Marlowe even raises a couple interesting points about the nature of habit and need. But the whole exercise feels hollow; one gets the feeling that she started doing heroin because she _wanted_ to become addicted, not for the warmth and the rush and the urgency of the high, not for the transcendence and vision of the ruined ecstatic junkie, but because she just didn't have anything else to write about. Perhaps next we'll see a book structured as a thesaurus about her harrowing caffeine addiction. Count me out of the bloodless solipsism displayed here; I'll take Denis Johnson's groping, fallen desperates (or, in a more closely related vein, D.F. Wallace's hyper-eloquent and witty recovering addicts) over Marlowe's well-dressed neurotics.
Rating: 
Summary: Get It
Review: This is a genuinely original and brilliant book. Though its foreground subject is heroin, the book meditates superbly on American life and culture in the present. It's a map to America as a well as a map to drugs. The prose is exquisite.
Rating:
Summary: Read It Now
Review: This is what became of you ! I had wondered over the years since Cambridge, since New York when you had your little business, and you moved from Philosophy to Money........I had not suspected you had made this journey too. I confess to being under-whelmed, unimpressed, and disappointed. In those days of Radcliffe you seemed to want to be incandescent and burned many around you; but in the end it was yourself you seared as you threw away potential and capability for whatever was vogue in the immediate. I hope you find satisfaction in your current role, you produce good prose, but you should consider content and not just form.An expensive, quality education which should have taught you to think, instead made you insecure and hovering on the borderline -I hope your brother avoided your mistakes. It is sad Ann, sad that you at last gain the recognition you wanted, but for this ! Not for what your mind could have produced, but how you deadened it, for what your failure made you do - a failure which did not require Harvard Yard or the fat of the land - or do you feel yourself another Coleridge ? So Ann, I popped up to say Hello after many years. I often wondered what had happened to you after I last met Jay......I am really saddened by this story - I hope you have gained some insight and perhaps an ounce of human compassion.
| 
