“Soft Core,” by Brittany Newell, a novel about Gen Z’s desperate need for connection
Translated by Pauvert, “Soft Core,” the second novel by American Brittany Newell, immerses the reader in the “clandestine spaces” of San Francisco. This text, written by a young author, also a stripper and dominatrix in a BDSM dungeon, has intrigued the English-speaking press.
Of Generation Z, those born between the late 1990s and early 2000s, it is customary to say that their identity is characterized by a certain fluidity rather than by a fixed concept. These are questions that permeate Brittany Newell's second novel, Soft Core, published Wednesday, August 27 by Pauvert and translated by Diniz Galhos. Is it "a dark novel, a satire on sex work, a romance?" wondered The Guardian at the beginning of the year, after the release of its original version in English.
What is certain is that it is not, as the author confided to the British daily, a matter of memories but a mixture of fiction and “sensory details”. “A decadent exploration of the vast and mysterious world of the appetites of the other”, summarizes the San Francisco Chronicle .
It follows Ruth, a young stripper adrift since Dino, her ex-boyfriend with whom she still lived in a Victorian house in San Francisco, disappeared without a trace. What follows is a wandering through the streets of the Californian city where Ruth's identity dissipates between her different aliases: Baby, at the strip club, or Miss Sunday, when she is hired as a dominatrix in a BDSM dungeon.
These are professions that the writer has also practiced, which nourishes the novel with an organic reflection on the bodies and sexuality of a generation tired of one-night stands. “Newell’s greatest strength lies in her ability to write about the body—Ruth’s and those of the people around her—in a way that is both unsettling and intimate. She manages to capture the feeling of inhabiting a body that is both her own and not hers, of being observed, desired, and reified while burning with the desire that the intimacy she shares with her clients allows her to establish sincere connections with them,” analyzes The Stanford Daily , the newspaper of the university from which she graduated.
“I'm a writer, so I've always been interested in stories, and I stumbled upon this kind of work where people tell you not only their stories but also their secrets. I always like to say that what makes a good writer is also what makes a good dominatrix: empathy, curiosity, and courage,” Brittany Newell told NPR .
A San Francisco native, the barely thirty-year-old also paints a portrait of several “clandestine spaces” in the coastal city , comments the women’s site Jezebel . Soft Core is “a novel that slips into the neon-lit underbelly of San Francisco, addressing themes of identity, power and the desperate, sometimes illusory, quest for human connection,” for the Stanford Daily. In her wanderings, Ruth brings to light “what lies behind the pink neon signs of strip clubs, but also in the large, drafty Victorian houses and the oppressive nighttime silence of wealthy neighborhoods,” lists The New York Times .
The Guardian , for its part, delighted in Brittany Newell's carnival of characters: "Particularly uptight strippers, grumpy madams, countless doppelgangers of her ex-boyfriend, and a Starbucks employee who builds dollhouses and sends her money every month, but without sex in return."
And while the final part of the book suffers from an abrupt resolution, as the Guardian and the New York Times observe, Soft Core weaves a portrait of an ultra-connected generation that, “desperately, finds it impossible to truly know each other,” concludes the Stanford Daily.
