'Crudo: A Novel' Olivia Laing (2018) London, Picador: a great book!
Wednesday, 4 Jul 2018, 17:11
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Edited by Steve Bamlett, Wednesday, 4 Jul 2018, 17:29
Crudo: A Novel Olivia Laing (2018) London, Picador
Fans have been waiting for a novel by Olivia Laing a long
time, whilst being more than satisfied with getting all that a novel gives from
her hybrid biographical – reflective writing. That writing took people,
landscapes and reflection of lived interior and exterior experience and
their interactions and made them into something like great writing, whose only
forebear might be Sebald.
Virginia Woolf’s story is combined with that of the river in
which she drowned herself, lonely male writers like Cheever with the alcohol
which substituted for their river of life-and-death and the human alienation at
the source of the value of even the cruellest artistic
lives-in-the-alienated-city.
Since this novel bases itself and its narrative voice on the
persona and life of Kathy Acker it too relates to (auto)biography. Its narrator
continually asserts that it, I, has an anachronistic relation to life (just as Acker
did in fact when she really lived) that might also allow Laing to inhabit both
the ‘I’ and the events of ‘its life’ momentarily. This is indeed what happens
more subliminally in her ‘(auto)biographical reflections’ but here the
problematic term is ‘I’: what it is that one can ‘mean’ by using that complex
term.
Kathy, by which I mean I, was
getting married. Kathy, by which I mean I, had just got off a plane …. Kathy
had written several books – Great Expectations,
Blood and Guts in High School, I expect you’ve heard of them. The man with whom
she was sleeping had not written any books. Kathy was angry. I mean I. I was
angry. And then I got married (1f.).
I’m sure we are meant to read this knowing that Acker is
dead and part of a literary tradition – that of the fictional autobiography.
Acker did write Great Expectations
but at the end of the novel, in the eyes
of her 100% husband, her 'I' becomes she and then the hero of another great fictional
autobiography, the Pip of Dicken’s Great
Expectations: ‘Pip, he said, My Pip.’ (131)
These acts of literary and cognitive anachronism are common
in this novel, that questions identity in relation to its ontology in time and
place as well as the epistemology of its meaning(s) in terms of society,
history and geography. This is not least the case in the character’s reports of
‘her world’, in which the language of Donald Trump vies with that of Acker:
Some sort of cord between action
and consequence has been severed. Things still happened, but not in any sensible
order, it was hard to talk about truth because some bits were hidden, the
result or maybe the cause, and anyway but the space between them was full of misleading
data, nonsense and lies. … Had decisions once led plainly to things happening
you could report on? She remembered it but distantly? (62f.)
This describes reflexively the relation of narrative voice
to the plot or events of a novel in a thoroughly dislocated way, which may also
be the condition of the post-Trump-and-Brexit narrator, neither American nor
English, neither man nor woman, straight nor gay, bi- nor mono-sexual, neither character
nor narrator, reader or read about, active or passive in their own life. Note
this doubly ironic riff on the cause of Acker’s actual death, breast cancer (it is an amazing and innovative form of writing):
The best thing about breast
cancer was the double mastectomy, lop them both off she’d said, I always hated
them. Hair cropped, skinny, flat-chested, she was a lovely dickless boy, a
wrinkling Dorian Gray, fondling her jewels… No one Kathy actually liked had a
stable gender identity, not really. Transitioning, she loved the word, with its
sense of constant emergence and zero arrival. She was indeterminate and
oversexed, a hot chrysalis, if she’d had a dick you better believe it would be
perfect, at least as good as David Bowie’s.
An important marriage is the one consequential narrative-event
of the novel that matters. But this ‘marriage’ isn’t either of Acker’s early
marriages or her final heterosexual partnership in London. Is it Laing’s
marriage and the learning about loving that involves? Who is to know? As with
all great fictional autobiography events are happily, whether they be result or
cause of something else in someone’s ‘life’ or not, in a space ‘full of
misleading data, nonsense, and lies.’ This is at its finest in a beautiful
passage I’ve quoted already on page 131 (read it yourself!) where ‘she’ is no longer ‘the first person’
(of course she also means ‘I’ by ‘the first person’) because she is purely what
‘she’ is – a third-person writer, whom might become anything, including the
seed of all consequence (the original ‘pip’), but also a character so lost they
might be actually in the kitchen not the bed but found by her loving reader and
which ‘hold’ her in their eye.
This is fine hybrid writing even more revealing and daringly
lost –in-itself than Laing’s earlier books, where her characters have had the
good grace to already have died for her. It is literary theory, literary criticism,
reflective and reflexive phenomenological philosophy, comment on life and
history including comparisons of sameness and difference in events and
personae. It is too good! Will it then be recognised as such by Booker readers?
I hope so, because it can work very differently for different readers.
This is
a writer who has undergone a long apprenticeship – just as Goethe and Dickens
and Woolf did – of learning to ‘be’ other and self simultaneously (‘Writing,
she can be anyone.’ (125). It bears all this in one of its more obvious
features – its play with the theme of literary borrowings (that are ‘something
borrowed’ (135ff.) for the wedding of ideal versions of her writer and reader)
and plagiarism. An important event in Acker’s life involved accusations of
plagiarism from Harold Robbins, her admission thereof, and Robbins’ refusal to
press charges because (I intuit) he believed that that was what writing was - a
play and symphony of ‘borrowings’, where cone can be either the sneak or ‘snake’
in your own life (120) but which painfully keeps waking up in a nightmare that
calls itself contemporary history – sometimes in the very words of a Trump
tweet (88f.). She calls it elsewhere (and it is Trump of Doom for the world): ‘nastiness
in small private places and out in the open, flagrant and stately (51).’
This is the best and most innovative novel, outside the
wonderfully under-rated ones of Ali Smith that I have read for a really LONG
time.
'Crudo: A Novel' Olivia Laing (2018) London, Picador: a great book!
Crudo: A Novel Olivia Laing (2018) London, Picador
Fans have been waiting for a novel by Olivia Laing a long time, whilst being more than satisfied with getting all that a novel gives from her hybrid biographical – reflective writing. That writing took people, landscapes and reflection of lived interior and exterior experience and their interactions and made them into something like great writing, whose only forebear might be Sebald.
Virginia Woolf’s story is combined with that of the river in which she drowned herself, lonely male writers like Cheever with the alcohol which substituted for their river of life-and-death and the human alienation at the source of the value of even the cruellest artistic lives-in-the-alienated-city.
Since this novel bases itself and its narrative voice on the persona and life of Kathy Acker it too relates to (auto)biography. Its narrator continually asserts that it, I, has an anachronistic relation to life (just as Acker did in fact when she really lived) that might also allow Laing to inhabit both the ‘I’ and the events of ‘its life’ momentarily. This is indeed what happens more subliminally in her ‘(auto)biographical reflections’ but here the problematic term is ‘I’: what it is that one can ‘mean’ by using that complex term.
Kathy, by which I mean I, was getting married. Kathy, by which I mean I, had just got off a plane …. Kathy had written several books – Great Expectations, Blood and Guts in High School, I expect you’ve heard of them. The man with whom she was sleeping had not written any books. Kathy was angry. I mean I. I was angry. And then I got married (1f.).
I’m sure we are meant to read this knowing that Acker is dead and part of a literary tradition – that of the fictional autobiography. Acker did write Great Expectations but at the end of the novel, in the eyes of her 100% husband, her 'I' becomes she and then the hero of another great fictional autobiography, the Pip of Dicken’s Great Expectations: ‘Pip, he said, My Pip.’ (131)
These acts of literary and cognitive anachronism are common in this novel, that questions identity in relation to its ontology in time and place as well as the epistemology of its meaning(s) in terms of society, history and geography. This is not least the case in the character’s reports of ‘her world’, in which the language of Donald Trump vies with that of Acker:
Some sort of cord between action and consequence has been severed. Things still happened, but not in any sensible order, it was hard to talk about truth because some bits were hidden, the result or maybe the cause, and anyway but the space between them was full of misleading data, nonsense and lies. … Had decisions once led plainly to things happening you could report on? She remembered it but distantly? (62f.)
This describes reflexively the relation of narrative voice to the plot or events of a novel in a thoroughly dislocated way, which may also be the condition of the post-Trump-and-Brexit narrator, neither American nor English, neither man nor woman, straight nor gay, bi- nor mono-sexual, neither character nor narrator, reader or read about, active or passive in their own life. Note this doubly ironic riff on the cause of Acker’s actual death, breast cancer (it is an amazing and innovative form of writing):
The best thing about breast cancer was the double mastectomy, lop them both off she’d said, I always hated them. Hair cropped, skinny, flat-chested, she was a lovely dickless boy, a wrinkling Dorian Gray, fondling her jewels… No one Kathy actually liked had a stable gender identity, not really. Transitioning, she loved the word, with its sense of constant emergence and zero arrival. She was indeterminate and oversexed, a hot chrysalis, if she’d had a dick you better believe it would be perfect, at least as good as David Bowie’s.
An important marriage is the one consequential narrative-event of the novel that matters. But this ‘marriage’ isn’t either of Acker’s early marriages or her final heterosexual partnership in London. Is it Laing’s marriage and the learning about loving that involves? Who is to know? As with all great fictional autobiography events are happily, whether they be result or cause of something else in someone’s ‘life’ or not, in a space ‘full of misleading data, nonsense, and lies.’ This is at its finest in a beautiful passage I’ve quoted already on page 131 (read it yourself!) where ‘she’ is no longer ‘the first person’ (of course she also means ‘I’ by ‘the first person’) because she is purely what ‘she’ is – a third-person writer, whom might become anything, including the seed of all consequence (the original ‘pip’), but also a character so lost they might be actually in the kitchen not the bed but found by her loving reader and which ‘hold’ her in their eye.
This is fine hybrid writing even more revealing and daringly lost –in-itself than Laing’s earlier books, where her characters have had the good grace to already have died for her. It is literary theory, literary criticism, reflective and reflexive phenomenological philosophy, comment on life and history including comparisons of sameness and difference in events and personae. It is too good! Will it then be recognised as such by Booker readers? I hope so, because it can work very differently for different readers.
This is a writer who has undergone a long apprenticeship – just as Goethe and Dickens and Woolf did – of learning to ‘be’ other and self simultaneously (‘Writing, she can be anyone.’ (125). It bears all this in one of its more obvious features – its play with the theme of literary borrowings (that are ‘something borrowed’ (135ff.) for the wedding of ideal versions of her writer and reader) and plagiarism. An important event in Acker’s life involved accusations of plagiarism from Harold Robbins, her admission thereof, and Robbins’ refusal to press charges because (I intuit) he believed that that was what writing was - a play and symphony of ‘borrowings’, where cone can be either the sneak or ‘snake’ in your own life (120) but which painfully keeps waking up in a nightmare that calls itself contemporary history – sometimes in the very words of a Trump tweet (88f.). She calls it elsewhere (and it is Trump of Doom for the world): ‘nastiness in small private places and out in the open, flagrant and stately (51).’
This is the best and most innovative novel, outside the wonderfully under-rated ones of Ali Smith that I have read for a really LONG time.
Steve