Live Girls Book

Following her critically acclaimed collection of short stories, City of Boys, Beth Nugent brings her dark and eerie vision to a powerful first novel.

Live Girls is the story of Catherine, in her twenties, who sells tickets in a run-down porn theater in a decrepit port city, A sign in the window of the seedy hotel where she lives reads Transients Welcome. Her only friend is Jerome, an anorexic drag queen who searches for love among the sailors.

As Catherine and Jerome set out for Hollywood, we witness -with equal horror and fascination -- their desperate attempt to find redemption in a world that offers them so little.

In haunting, stylized prose, Nugent takes us deep into her protagonist's psyche while painting a bizarre -- yet oddly familiar -- picture of a dissociated, disconnected America. Live Girls is a tour de force that will leave no one who reads it unshaken.


From the Hardcover edition.

Publishers Weekly

Alienated characters drift aimlessly through a bleak urban wasteland in Nugent's rather turgid first novel, whose flat, affectless tone becomes monotonous early. The narrator, Catherine, is a college dropout who works at an X-rated movie house and lives in a transient hotel. Catherine is obsessed by memories of her dead sister; likewise, the porn theater's owner, Dave, is obsessed with his former wife, whom he accidently killed. The closest thing to a friend in Catherine's life is Jerome, a self-absorbed transvestite hustler. Eventually, Dave produces his awkward, unsophisticated nephew, Danny, in the hopes that he and Catherine will somehow hit it off, rather wishful thinking considering both characters' utter inability to communicate. The extreme emotional isolation of everyone in the book makes it difficult for any sort of plot to develop, and a reader's empathy is pushed to the breaking point by such narcissistic characters. While Nugent mined very similar territory to great effect in her debut short-story collection, City of Boys, the material is not sufficient to propel this novel. (Apr.)