"Going Down" is the story of a young woman wishing to be an actor, struggling to attend NYU and financing it all as a call girl. The novel follows Bennington Bloom through a rambling series of somewhat promising misadventures that quickly lead to nowhere. She starts as a high-class call-girl, then gradually slips down a slope to less prestigious work. As she gets sucked in further, her prostitution begins to interfere, unhappily, with her normal, other life. Filled with numerous subplots, Belle makes a fair attempt at exposing the entirety of her character's life, rather than simply focusing on the tabloid-esque professional sex.
The premise of this, Belle's first novel, is at least mildly intriguing, and as the story develops, it is rarely dull. The anecdotes and chapters are all quite short, generally refusing to wallow in the novelty of any one situation.
As such mild praise infers, this is a dismal failure of a novel. The heroine is incredibly undeveloped and incoherent, yet she is the most intricate of all the characters. The rest are stiff gimmicks, so tritely and incompletely characterized that it is difficult to imagine them as anything but the product of one episodic situation.
"Gimmick" is the most apt way to describe Belle's work. Every character is a superficial mannequin put on "stage" to make some contrived joke or another, generally at the expense of any sense of realism developed earlier. And never, not even once, is the humor of Belle's characters worth the absolute shattering of her attempted fictional-dream. The jokes are invariably unfunny and unclever.
Taken together, the cardboard characters and corny humor are enough to ruin "Going Down." But it gets worse. Much worse. The story goes nowhere. The heroine starts out looking for a means to support herself and fulfill her desire to act. Along the way, the plot and characterization become so muddled that the novel ends with her going out to dinner with some random man she meets in the subway. Nothing is resolved, certainly, but neither is anything really confronted. Bennington is as shallow a major character as the others are minor characters. There is no development or exploration of the labyrinth of her psyche (or at least, the psyche one would imagine a girl her age, thrown into a life of such problems and quirky developments, to possess). Instead, she merely flits around through trauma after trauma. The only way we know she even notices her surroundings is that she sometimes breaks out in random spurts of tears or nausea.
This may be the worst part of the novel. If Bennington finds herself in a sad situation, the author seems to automatically turn on "the tears" or "the vomiting." In both cases, it has the feel of an automatic, ineffectual device that exacerbates Belle's absolute ineptitude as a psychologist of her characters and as a novelist. She makes no impact on the emotions or conscience of the reader at all. Her novel has more in common with a marathon of bad television comedies than anything resembling art. Perhaps her next attempt at novel-writing will be more fecund, but this first one is easy to dismiss as vacuous and utterly unimportant.
- James Wilson