Novel: Toxicology

Overview

"Toxicology" follows a circle of artists and neighbors in contemporary New York City, centering on Mimi Smith, a Filipino writer whose life and work are entangled with a neighborhood of volatile creative personalities. The novel tracks the fraught friendship between Mimi and her elderly neighbor, Eleanor Delacroix, an once-celebrated playwright now living in the shadow of her own legacy. As small ambitions, old reputations and private wounds converge, the story examines how artistic life can both animate and poison the people who inhabit it.

Plot and Structure

The narrative unfolds through scenes that move between Mimi's attempts to sustain a career and Eleanor's struggle with aging, memory and reputation. Mimi negotiates cramped apartments, strained relationships and career disappointments while becoming increasingly entangled in Eleanor's life: caretaking, defending, and at times colliding with the older woman's fierce personality. Complications arise from a cast of neighbors and friends whose rivalries, betrayals and addictions escalate tensions, forcing Mimi to confront choices about loyalty, truth and survival in a precarious cultural milieu.
Rather than a linear, plot-driven thriller, the novel is episodic, mapping the shifting alliances and small catastrophes that make up artistic communities. Scenes focus on rehearsals, readings, late-night conversations, and the subtle violence of neglect. The plot's momentum derives from interpersonal crises, public humiliations, relapses, and the slow exposure of long-held secrets, rather than grand dramatic reversals, producing a portrait of daily life pushed to the edge.

Characters and Relationships

Mimi Smith acts as the emotional center: observant, resourceful, sometimes compromised, and often torn between self-preservation and empathy. Her Filipino background informs her sensibility and relationship to the city, offering an interior perspective on displacement and cultural negotiation. Eleanor Delacroix is both mentor and antagonist, a brilliant but imperious figure whose past accolades contrast sharply with present vulnerability. Their bond is complex: intergenerational tenderness sits beside resentment, and moments of genuine intimacy are shadowed by old grievances.
Supporting characters populate the margins, friends, former lovers, aspiring artists and toxic neighbors, each bringing their own addictions and contradictions. These figures function as mirrors and catalysts, revealing Mimi's limits and Eleanor's contradictions. Romantic entanglements, artistic rivalries and caregiving responsibilities intersect, creating situations that test loyalties and force reckonings.

Themes and Tone

Art, addiction and redemption are interwoven throughout, explored less as abstract concepts than as lived conditions. The novel probes how creative ambition can become a form of self-harm and how artistic communities can enable or destroy. Addictions, both chemical and behavioral, are depicted as recurring struggles that shape choices and reshape relationships rather than simple moral failings. Redemption is portrayed as fragile, contingent on small acts of courage, confession and repair rather than sweeping transformations.
The prose balances sharp wit with melancholic observation, capturing the humor and cruelty of urban creative life. There is a keen attention to language and performance, how words are used to wound, to charm and to conceal, so the book feels as much about the ethics of storytelling as it is about friendship and survival. The ending resists tidy resolution, reflecting the novel's interest in how people learn to live with compromise and consequence.