Down & Out in 1970s New York

Late in Irini Spanidou's new novel, "Before" (Knopf, 212 pages, $23), the heroine, Beatrice, an editorial assistant at a publishing house, despairs of having to attend an obnoxious author's book party. "As for her prose," she observes of the just-published author, "it was somberly plain and sturdy — something like sackcloth, but with a tighter weave. Her novels had a dour realism that Beatrice would respect if the effect were not merely dreary."

This devastating assessment is cringe-inducing for the reader since it applies so precisely to "Before" itself. Ms. Spanidou intends to take us back to an edgier time: New York in the 1970s. "SoHo was dangerous then," she writes. "Most buildings still housed working factories, many stood empty, and only a few had been turned into living lofts. ... Every day came new reports of robberies, muggings, a shooting or a rape." In her occasionally insightful depiction of Beatrice and the men and women drawn to her, Ms. Spanidou's New York isn't exciting, glamorous, or dangerous. It is, rather, merely dreary. Beatrice, 25 and gorgeous, is in a rut that dwarfs the typical post-college blues. Still at work on her unfinished senior thesis — a spectacularly ponderous attempt to reconcile Kierkegaard and Simone Weil — she lives on a trust fund but works her publishing job to avoid her alcoholic, adulterous husband, Ned. She is the object of obsession of almost everyone she meets, including her overdramatic but caring friend, Faye; a salacious older man named Simon; Colin, the sensitive musician downstairs; Ned's brother, Cyril; and a teenage heroin addict.

The plot, such as it is, charts a series of crises that lead to Beatrice's breaks with all these characters. There are "events": two cataclysmically failed dinner parties; an excruciating cabaret performance; and a disaster at a restaurant. But these scenes take a back seat to Ms. Spanidou's interest in the private musings of a beautiful woman victimized by her own beauty.

Like Mary Gaitskill's "Veronica" (2005), the novel tracks the undoing of a promising young woman at the hands of coolly calculating males. Both novels emphasize — without ever really demonstrating — their heroines' unusual gifts of insight and sensibility, which cannot find an outlet in a cruel, male-dominated culture. Yet the Manichaean simplicity of both novels' view of the battle of the sexes, and the helplessness of their heroines in the face of their victimization, seems complicit with the kind of prefeminist ideology both authors explicitly reject. Ms. Spanidou's prose, both over-emotive and under-descriptive, also echoes Ms. Gaitskill's, but "Before" lacks the structural virtuosity and convincingly poetic language of "Veronica."

"Before" also feels like a recapitulation of Ms. Spanidou's last novel, "Fear." There is a similarly restless, magnetic heroine; that heroine's similarly dangerous, pseudo-lesbian relationship with an unstable, demanding friend; the criminal figure on the margins — a serial killer in "Fear," a pedophilic, drug-dealing neighbor in "Before" — who is unaccountably, even irresponsibly, romanticized by both the heroine and author. Most problematically, both novels substitute for plot and character a combination of gauzy internal monologue, philosophizing in the form of dialogue, and absurdly over-the-top set pieces.

There are no such problems in Ms. Spanidou's 1986 debut novel, "God's Snake," the story of Anna Karystinou, a young girl growing up in postwar Greece. That novel locates in a single family the epic and intimate quality of ancient myth. In one scene, a frozen crow thaws and awakens, and the effect is hypnotic as pure physical observation and as an evocation of sexual awakening. Ms. Spanidou is never overbearing about this symbolic content, and she successfully navigates between precision and ambiguity. "Before," on the other hand, is simply confusing. Nothing about Beatrice justifies the other characters' interest in her, and Ms. Spanidou's evocation of time and place — pitch-perfect in "God's Snake" — extends in "Before" only to a cursory mention of Lou Reed at a party.

As Beatrice gets more and more worked up about the author whose book party she dreads, she finally explodes: "What was she doing reading this thing? What was she doing here?" If "Before" does not quite drive the reader to such overwrought expressions of existential angst, it does arouse a feeling of disappointment that its author has not yet produced the novel of which "God's Snake" clearly proved she is capable.

Mr. Woolfe is an editorial assistant at Farrar, Straus & Giroux.