Live Girls

By Beth Nugent

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 13, 2011
• ISBN: 9780307789150

Reviews for Live Girls

[edwinbcn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Live girls by the American author Beth Nugent is impressive in that pulls the reader into a very depressive world, which is hard to forget, long after finishing the novel. For the first part of the story, the action is centered in the film theatre, the cinema Dave owns. Catherine works there selling tickets. The scene is permeated by alienation. The characters are deeply entrenched in their own misery, which is their reality. They cannot see what their world is like, and therefore they cannot break free from it.The characters' inability to see outside the box is best illustrated by their concerns over the popcorn vending machine. Popcorn is strongly associated with watching movies, but not in a porn cinema. While Catherine still believes she is there to sell tickets, the casual remark that no tickets were sold in the afternoons before she started working there suggests that her real function is quite different. Another denial of her existence is that Dave always calls her Karen, rather than Catherine.The ticket vending booth is consistently referred to as the "bubble". Catherine lives and works in this bubble, which stands for nothing less than her depressed state of mind. Catherine has all the characteristics of a manic depression. She is a college graduate, but works in this seedy porn cinema for a guy who has murdered hid wife. Her thoughts are dominated by memories of her dead sister. She lives in a gruesome tenement building, and has no friends or social attachments other than a anorexic, drug addict and transvestite hustler, called Jerome.Dave's decision to try to improve the business by bringing in "live girls" subconsciously triggers Catherine to escape from this misery. She takes Jerome with her in her car, and while their initial plan is to drive to Hollywood, the reality of harsh winter weather they would not withstand, compels them to drive south towards Florida.The journey shows Catherine ever more vulnerable by the contrast between her and Jerome, and other people they meet. Removed from the relative safety of her bubble her sister's pull on her becomes stronger, a pull towards death. The book ends with a sense of some terrible impending danger, near at hand.