The Story of Junk

The literary and cinematic worlds may have overdosed on tales of heroin abuse lately, but Linda Yablonsky’s coolly authentic debut novel, The Story of Junk, offers new hooks. For starters, her heroine addict is a ”nice girl” who abandons promising pursuits (writing, cooking in a hip restaurant) to become a smack dealer for Manhattan’s mid-’80s art scene. In a time-honored fiction device, the strangely sympathetic fed who busts the narrator on page one wants her whole story, so she flashes back to her hard-partying club days, drugged-up lovers, and attraction to ”a life of pure sensation.” It’s a harrowing saga, one that Yablonsky’s clean prose renders piercingly. B