MURDER BIMBO, by Rebecca Novack
The premise of “Murder Bimbo,” Rebecca Novack’s deviously intelligent new novel, is bracingly straightforward. “I’m a 32-year-old sex worker who just killed a politician on what I thought were the orders of the American government,” our narrator explains.
We meet Murder Bimbo on the run, as she frantically emails her story to a feminist podcast host. It’s irresistible: Men posing as undercover agents surprised her at home, then invited her to test for a mysterious position. Based on her off-the-charts scores in narcissism, resourcefulness and personability, they hired her for a mission that was, admittedly, not for everyone: “This is not a desk job, and the project you’ll be working on, there will be casualties. In fact, that’s the goal.”
Their mark was a politician they called Meat Neck, claiming his populist momentum and abhorrent views constituted real threats to democracy. The romance of the plan seduced Murder Bimbo. “It was my duty,” she writes. “They needed me, me.”
As the “bait,” her role required her to poison Meat Neck’s martini during a tryst. Looking back, she wonders why she was even necessary. “More likely, I figured, I was just learning what it felt like to be part of a bureaucracy. Four men and one woman working full-time to do something a nongovernment worker could do in an hour.”
Competent, and she’s funny, too.
But luring Meat Neck into a hotel room isn’t enough. Seducing us, too, is part of Murder Bimbo’s mission. Even if you’re not primed to root for assassins, her deadpan observations and emotional intelligence may wear you down. She’s so canny that it’s easy to overlook some profound lapses in logic. How could such a savvy woman, let alone one working at society’s fringes, succumb to delusions of patriotic grandeur?
After finishing her confession to the podcast host, Murder Bimbo begins another email, this one to her ex-girlfriend, who’s kept the narrator in an emotional stranglehold years after their breakup and who spurred her political awakening.
In this version, the facts are reshuffled, though the outcome remains the same. We come to see that Meat Neck is far more than a political trophy for Murder Bimbo; there’s a painful personal dimension. As she tells her ex: “I killed him for you.”
Even that isn’t the full truth — more twists await in the next section. The novel’s three-act structure is a daring narrative choice, and pays off. More than the central assassination plot or the deception and betrayals she describes, Murder Bimbo’s psychological manipulations are what send the book into thriller territory. It’s a genuine pleasure to sift through her contradictions (a Marxist who loves money!) and pan for the truth.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Murder Bimbo is skilled in describing the taxonomy of men. The day of the killing, she spots “a Gen-Xer with a superhero franchise, transition lenses and the murk of bisexuality chatting it up with more than one pallid but jacked, bug-eyed sex symbol with line cook energy.”
I’m used to hearing lines like this because of my screen time averages and the concentration of Democratic Socialists in my ZIP code, but I can imagine such sentences, with their collision of internet-rotted adjectives, rubbing a reader the wrong way. Trust me when I say Novack has a great ear for the inanities of contemporary language, just like all great satirists do.
In every version of her story, the narrator is painfully aware of how sex workers are viewed: as disposable shape-shifters paid to fulfill a customer’s desire. Spinning a tale isn’t all that different from keeping a client happy, and as she shows time and again, blurring the facts can lead you to a deeper truth.
MURDER BIMBO | By Rebecca Novack | Avid Reader | 212 pp. | $28.99
Joumana Khatib is an editor at The Times Book Review.
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