Review by New York Times Review
THE ENGLISH WRITER OLIVIA LAING'S slim and audacious first work of fiction opens like this: "Kathy, by which I mean I, was getting married. Kathy, by which I mean I, had just got off a plane from New York." "Crudo" is set in the summer of 2017 and its central character, the "I" and the "she," is both Olivia Laing and Kathy Acker, the experimental writer and iconoclast who died of cancer in 1997. And so the novel is several things at once: a work of autofiction detailing key events in Laing's life, a counterfactual fiction in which Kathy Acker is alive and getting married and a rigorous piece of fictional appropriation. In her excellent biography, "After Kathy Acker," Chris Kraus describes Acker as the first woman to achieve "the iconic status of Great Writer as Countercultural Hero." A denizen of New York's now-mythic '70s downtown, Acker moved in the same circles as Robert Mapplethorpe, Carolee Schneeman, Simone Forti and Gary Indiana. Versed in conceptual art as well as the literary canon, she had a voracious intellect, a blender of a brain that processed and equalized a swirl of elements, from pornography and pulp novels to Georges Bataille and Charles Dickens. Acker favored pastiche and collage, often cutting and pasting texts from disparate sources. She wanted to "put them against each other, change the frames," as she once explained in a British television interview. The resulting prose was feverish, with a relentlessly up-close perspective. A sample, from her Pushcart Prize-winning story "New York City in 1979": "The world is gray afterbirth. Fake. All of New York City is fake is going to go all my friends are going crazy all my friends know they're going crazy disaster is the only thing that's happening." Written with bristling intelligence, "Crudo" borrows liberally from Acker, a formal tribute to a master of appropriation. Laing drops unattributed quotes from Acker and others into her text (although they're cited later, in an appendix). She also uses Acker's technique of inhabiting multiple voices and identities, all contained within a single character - the "I" and the "Kathy" of those first sentences. But the effect of "Crudo" is strikingly different from that of Acker's work. In an interview with the philosopher Sylvere Lotringer, Acker said: "I became very interested in the model of schizophrenia. I wanted to explore the use of the word I, that's the only thing I wanted to do. So I placed very direct autobiographical, just diary material, right next to fake diary material. ... I put the fake first person next to the true first person." Where Acker's fiction is full of hard juxtapositions and divided selves - pirates and postpunk feminists, Jackie Kennedy and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec - "Crudo" revolves around a less extreme but equally crucial disjunction: between the ordinary life of Olivia Laing in 2017 and the extraordinary life of Kathy Acker in the second half of the last century. This fissure of identity and voice is used not to stage a "model of schizophrenia" but to explore quieter states of anxiety and discontent. as A result, the novel offers an altogether smoother ride than Acker's fiction, both in its subject matter and its prose style. "Crudo" is concerned with domestication - with the central character's anxieties about marriage as an institution, as well as the material clutter of what is commonly known as lifestyle. There are descriptions of dinner menus, of house and apartment interiors in England. There are mentions of Isabel Marant dresses and wedding plans. It's fair to say that the world of "Crudo" is somewhat cozier than the '70s Downtown associated with Acker. At moments, the novel pokes deadpan fun at that divide: "Their new table arrived, that was exciting." But at other times - when, for example, it reproduces a sincere but familiar expression of political anxiety - it tempts us to wonder what Acker's febrile imagination would have created from much of our current landscape of accelerated Reddit threads and internet conspiracy. If alive today, how would Acker have articulated her political outrage? But the larger questions that haunt the book are "Why Acker?" and "Why now?" Laing doesn't try to make the case that Acker - a remarkably transgressive but also a remarkably privileged individual - is the voice best positioned to critique or represent these times. Instead, the impulse to resurrect Acker feels more personal. "Crudo" begins as a piece of conceptual swagger, only to morph into something far more intimate and in some ways more exceptional. "Writing, she can be anyone," Laing declares. At its heart, "Crudo" is aspirational in the best and most moving sense of the word. It's a novel about middle age, about that moment when we start to recognize the boundaries and limitations of the people we have become. It's about the longing to escape our ossified selves - to become, if only for a moment or within the pages of a novel, someone wilder and more radically free. And in staging that longing so directly and so honestly, Olivia Laing makes "Crudo" her own. What might Acker have made of our current political landscape? KATIE kitamura'S most recent novel is "A Separation."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"Avant-garde, middle-class-in-flight" is the way Kathy, modeled on experimental novelist Kathy Acker and the heroine of this penetrating debut novel from biographer and memoirist Laing, thinks of herself. Unlike Acker, who died at age 50 in 1997, this Kathy is age 40 in 2017 and is getting ready to marry her boyfriend. As the tale toggles back and forth between Rome and Manhattan, present and past, Laing (The Lonely City)-who laces her narrative with phrases subtly quoted from Acker's texts-fantasizes about how the author might have reacted to the age of Twitter ("her scrying glass"), Facebook, Instagram, and information overload. Kathy's thoughts-which are the novel's sum and substance-are like those of an Acker character: moments of self-consciousness and anxiety aswirl with gloomy reflections on recent historical events including the Trump presidency; Brexit; nuclear proliferation in North Korea; the Grenfell Tower fire in London; the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Va.; and so on. The world that Kathy moves in is, like that in Joyce's Ulysses, full of touchstones for intimate memories and reveries. Laing's novel can be read as an account of one individual's personal odyssey through a turbulent era defined by "fire and fascism," searching for peace. As in her nonfiction, Laing trenchantly depicts the life of the creative mind. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The days leading up to the summer 2017 wedding of Kathy, a New Yorker living in London, to an Englishman almost 30 years her senior are punctuated by news of underground nuclear testing in North Korea, floods in Houston, the Grenfell Tower fire, and much ado about President Donald Trump. In Italy, before the wedding, the couple mingle with a well-heeled crowd before returning to London to finesse the wedding and their future together. The details of the fictional Kathy's life bear more than a passing resemblance to those of the late novelist and poet Kathy Acker, with extensive quotes from Acker's actual writing, and include an absent father, a mother who committed suicide, private school girlhood, and a double mastectomy. The jazzy stream-of-consciousness writing perfectly suits this zippy novel about people living comfortable lives surrounded by unsettling Instagram images. VERDICT As Acker was known for basing much of her work on the writing of others, so Laing (The Trip to Echo Spring; The Lonely City) similarly appropriates Acker's life as the basis for this clever work. [See Prepub Alert, 3/12/18.]-Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The political and personal chaos of the summer of 2017 as it tumbles through the consciousness of a writer named Kathy.With this brief, breathless experimental novel, Laing (The Lonely City, 2016, etc.) has left the world of literary nonfiction behind and planted an explorer's flag in an unusual, individual destination somewhere on the continent of fiction. The narrative begins with Kathy's arrival in England on a plane from New York. She is met by her fiance, who we will eventually learn is also a writer, 29 years older than she. At this early point in the story, there is also another man in her life, but this turns out to be no big dealthat kind of plot is not the focus here, though Kathy will at some point get married and, at some time after that, will actually fall in love. A focus at least as prominent as this "love story" is creating a record of the ongoing avalanche of terrible news that characterizes this time in the age of Trump and Brexit, the threat of war with North Korea, various terrorist incidents, murders of innocents, Steve Bannon's resignation, etc. Another major concern is the overlap of the narrator with the character of the late transgressive feminist writer Kathy Acker. Since the real Kathy Acker died in 1997, this Kathy can't be that Kathy, but on the first page of the book, she is credited with writing Acker's books, and lines from Acker's work are woven through the text and footnoted at the end. This Kathy is close to that Kathy in body and spirit. "The best thing about breast cancer was the double mastectomy, lop them both off she said, I'd always hated them. Hair cropped, skinny, flat-chested, she was a lovely dickless boy, a wrinkling Dorian Gray, finding her jewels....She was indeterminate and oversexed, a hot chrysalis, and if she'd had a dick you better believe it would be perfect, at least as good as David Bowie's." To enjoy this book, you have to stop trying to understand it. If you can, you may well experience a warm sense of recognition at the absurdity and impossibility of trying to carry on a life in these times.Mysterious, bizarre, frustrating, weirdly smart, and pretty cool. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
