FICTION

ICED: A Novel by Ray Shell (Random House: $20; 264 pp.). There are many arresting passages in Ray Shell’s first novel, “Iced,” and none more striking than the narrator’s comment that he has recently “taken it easy, which was hard ‘cause I have money.” Cornelius Washington Jr., you see, is a crack-head: money always burns a hole in his pocket, represents nothing more than carfare to the next brief high, when the crack pipe will likewise burn yet another hole in the fabric of Washington’s life. “Iced” is his 1991 diary, laced with countless nightmares from the past, and Shell--a Brooklyn-raised actor now working in West End musicals in London--has written it to express the rage and horror he felt on encountering, on a return visit to the U.S., some of his boyhood friends. “Iced” is a cautionary novel, but far from preachy and not the least bit wooden: Shell’s writing is frighteningly compelling, especially when it comes to drugs and sex, the two obsessions that in Washington’s life become virtually interchangeable. The most remarkable aspect of Iced, though, is that it’s not a simple tour de force: Washington’s drug-abuse confessions make for compulsive reading, but just as good are the descriptions of his early promise as a Columbia University scholarship student and successful, if cocaine-fueled, career in the music business. Washington is self-deluding, self-excusing, paranoid, often offensive and often racist, but at bottom he’s a deeply sympathetic character, a victim of his own cocksure attitude as much as drugs and a callous, prejudiced society. “Iced,” what Washington calls his “book of crimes,” will make you angry and will make you flinch . . . and here that’s a good thing, a sign that Shell has hit, squarely, a raw nerve.