FLASHOUT, by Alexis Soloski
Alexis Soloski’s “Flashout” is a sleek 280-page engine that roars from New York City sleaze to sun-dazed Los Angeles guilt. This exhilarating thriller splices alternating timelines to chart the evolution, and erosion, of Allison Hayes, a young theater performer with more than a few secrets.
The curtain rises in 1972 New York, with a 19-year-old Allison ducking her college curfew to witness an underground performance — a twisted take on the Book of Exodus — that spills out onto a grimy Times Square sidewalk and unfurls into a hallucinatory street pageant. The show, which might seem desperately outmoded to a modern audience, strikes Allison as electric, and before long she’s entwined with the troupe, Theater Negative, and its found-family chaos, presided over by the magnetic Peter, who is at once artist, prophet, predator. Despite paying lip service to the group’s philosophy of working as a collective, his self-image is clear when assigning roles: “I, of course, will play God.”
The scene then shifts to 1997 Los Angeles, where Allison — now Mrs. Morales — teaches theater at a private school, coaching well-heeled teenagers through Shakespeare monologues while privately staging a double life. By day she tolerates sex with the headmaster, a balding and blandly handsome man named Dan, to keep her job; by night she cruises for no-strings encounters with women in a bid to recapture something raw and unrehearsed. (Her disdain for her students crackles off the page, and it’s here that the writing delivers some of its most delicious humor: “I think you mean wanton, not wonton; it refers to shamelessness, not dumplings,” she corrects while watching “as her students confidently assassinated the English language.”) But Allison’s controlled present is a mask that keeps slipping, and her disturbing thoughts hint at a dark past: “She could run at the girl, slam her head into the window’s glass, shove her over the canyon’s lip,” she thinks of a conniving student director. “But she’d spent years quieting those impulses.” When an anonymous message arrives, seemingly from someone in her past, the fragile narrative Allison has built begins to disintegrate.
The dual narration is a structural delight. Young Allison’s chapters are written in propulsive, breath-hot first person, taking us deep inside the filthy loft where she bunks with Theater Negative’s cast of misfits: “She showed me to a sagging mattress on the floor and then handed me a glass of juice, spiked with some clear liquor, before falling back asleep. Peter had me then, bent over the sink in the awful bathroom, its tub ringed in dirt, its toilet worse.” Here bohemian cosplay mutates into a genuine cult. Middle-aged Allison, on the other hand, speaks in the more distant third person, holding us at arm’s length, her sentences trimmed with the precision of someone who’s spent years bleaching memory: “There was nothing wrong with wanting women. … They couldn’t fire her for a thing like that. Not anymore. There were protections. But they could make it hard for her.” The contrast creates an uncanny stereo effect: the impulsive past chasing its own echo, the guarded present bracing for impact.
And while “Flashout” may sprawl across decades and continents, the pacing is tight. A veteran New York Times theater critic and reporter, Soloski knows exactly where to end a chapter to keep her audience on the edge of their seats. She knows, too, how to mine the period detail with an expert eye for mise-en-scène: 1972 springs to life via Jell-O salads, white plastic purses adorned with red cherries, baby oil as moisturizer. The ’90s are just as vividly evoked: beepers, video stores, the advent of “electronic mail” and the dissonant soundtrack of a dial-up connection hauling itself into consciousness. At times the imagery flirts with excess — “Her voice was low, like wind through sycamore” — but in a novel that places the seductions and dangers of excess center stage, this stylistic swagger feels appropriate.
The principal players are deftly drawn, convincing in their messy fallibility. Peter, the troupe’s Svengali, could have slid into cliché, but Soloski grants him a bruised charisma; we see why smart women keep handing him their passports. A fellow performer, Rosa, is also a meticulously realized character: damaged, funny, dangerous, irresistible. Her every appearance dials up the tension until it is exquisitely unbearable. While Rosa’s “inch-thick Brooklyn accent” feels pitch-perfect, the British characters sound like caricatures at times: “Forgive me for last night, won’t you, Alice? Fear I wasn’t entirely the gentleman.” But then, perhaps they too are playing a role, hamming it up for their credulous American friends who are all too eager to milk a wealthy benefactor, never mind the eventual cost.
A stylish exercise in suspense, “Flashout” plumbs the larger argument that performance can be liberation or snare, sometimes in the same half-beat. With a spotlight-sharp gaze, Soloski tracks how the hunger for audience attention can seduce someone into rewriting their moral script. Even after the final curtain falls, the questions the novel raises — about power, persona, complicity — linger like stage smoke.
FLASHOUT | By Alexis Soloski | Flatiron | 277 pp. | $28.99
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