[REVIEW] Crudo by Olivia Laing

(W.W. Norton & Company, 2018)

REVIEW BY S.N. KIRBY

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This is not a book meant to soothe. In fact, this is a book that’s been written without any concern for the reader’s well-being. And why should it be? The year is 2017 and Donald Trump is president, Nazis are on the rise, and nuclear war between The United States and North Korea feels eminent. (No sweat, a year later and Trump will tell a rally in West Virginia about how he and Kim Jung Un “fell in love” that summer—kind of like Kathy Acker.) Everything about the book infects the reader with the same skin bursting sensations of that summer in history and Kathy Acker’s general emotional stasis.

Olivia Laing’s debut novel reads as Virginia Wolf stream of consciousness meets William Burroughs’ propensity for crudeness. Every breath and beat of the book evokes feeling rather than thought. What’s remembered isn’t necessarily what a character said or a particularly witty comment, but rather the emotion that the skin is an inefficient container for the self. Everything suddenly feels too tight, as if we too are inches away from crumbling like the world around us. The title itself evokes a sense that the world and the self are hurtling too fast for the writer to catch up with them both: Crudo. Laing’s book is raw and rough, like a deep dive of the id in motion.

The narrative follows a close third on our radical heroine, Kathy Acker. But even this self is a slipping of psyche—a playful act of creative borrowing. Channeling the spirit of a post-mortem Kathy Acker, there is a continuance of the experimentalist writer’s self. Of course, it’s not actually Kathy Acker. She died in Tijuana in 1997. Or did she? I’d like to think not. Instead, I imagine her slipping in and amongst the pages of Laing’s novel, in pure spirit form.

Like Kathy Acker’s work, Oilivia Laing draws inspiration from the creative borrowing of William Burroughs and Andy Warhol. This combination of influence draws from both the late Kathy Acker, who often referred to Burroughs as part of her artistic lineage, and Olivia Laing, who researched and wrote about Andy Warhol for her nonfiction book Lonely City. In the formation of the prose, Laing inserts the late Kathy Acker’s quotes as the thoughts of the character Kathy Acker in a form that mirrors the stylings of Burroughs’ cut-ups. The character Kathy Acker refers to herself as, “Warhol’s daughter, niece at least, a grave-robber, a bandit, happy to snatch what she needed but also morally invested in the cause: that there was no need to invent, you could make anything from out of the overflowing midden of the already-done, the as Beckett put it nothing new, it was economic also stylish to help yourself to the grab bag of the actual.” It’s all very meta.

The lines between Olivia Laing, Kathy Acker the character, and Kathy Acker the writer are constantly thinning. Trying to find and follow the lines can be a bit of a maddening experience. Olivia Laing just married poet Ian Patterson. Kathy Acker marries an older man, another famous writer. Is Kathy Acker the character a stand-in for Laing? Or is the character Kathy Acker a reincarnation of the late Kathy Acker? Or is the character Kathy Acker just that, a character unto herself? There’s a weird and twisted truth in that she is all three. Call me legion for we are many.

Love may be the dividing point of the self and character. Something about the way Kathy Acker describes her relationship to love and partnership feels authentic to her character alone, “she was like a feral animal, she had no idea what to do with love, she experienced it as an invasion, as a prelude to loss and pain . . . .” There is something wild and feral about her in the way she moves through the world; doing whatever she wants, whenever she wants. There’s little sense of consequence in action, just pure action from the id. When it comes to loving her partner, she shouts and condemns him on whims that seem more set by nature than emotional causality. It was hot. There was a full moon. Kathy Acker is in a state of constant motion because she has emptied herself out so completely, that she becomes a part of the roving rage and chaos of the universe.

This is what makes Kathy Acker the perfect character to tell the story of the summer of 2017. The translucent line between herself and the outside world tunes her into the emotions of the moment. She acts as a living mirror to the feelings flooding the world consciousness. There is a sense of wanting to destroy for the sake of destruction: “A thing people said a lot that year, and especially the year before, x is a trashfire, also I want to burn everything, sometimes eroded to: burn everything.” She feels this so strongly, and often times without any kind of distance. The same ripping and tearing that the world seems to be tuning into on a mass level, resonates within Kathy Acker’s emotional microcosm. Her emotional states are often a reflection of the outside/inside relationship between herself and others. She is fighting, always. Pushing against something, anything with mass, and trying to break free.

So much of the text revolves around the idea of crashing open the self, which unveils an animal-like rawness to Kathy Acker’s actions and emotions. There’s a rather lovely scene where Kathy Acker feels this sensation of wanting to break open with such intense physicality that it pulsates off the page and beats with a wild passion: “She put the claws on the table and hit them hard. It was brilliant, she would have been happy to smash many more things. She hit the back of the crab as hard as she could. Nothing happened. She hit it again. A network of cracks appeared. She pried at it with her fingers, tearing out small white chunks of flesh.” There is something extraordinary feral about this moment that rings true to the same wild, pure id of the world’s consciousness. Everything feels like it’s being ripped and torn apart. Why shouldn’t Kathy Acker want to feel the same way?

Raw emotion spills upon the pages, leaving the reader with a neurotic and itchy feeling. Like somehow, Kathy Acker found her way under our skin in an attempt to crack open the shells of ourselves. I can almost hear her there, pounding away from within. Suddenly, the world feels too hot, too small, too maddening. As for the question of love, well, Kathy Acker has a moment where—in the same carefree, childlike rush of emotion—she says profoundly that yes, she can and does love! Although, I think Kathy Acker knows herself best when she says, “I grew up wild, I want to stay wild.” Something tells me that for a creature such as this, love may be another container, another shell, another self that is meant to be cracked open and freed once more.

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S.N. Kirby is a graduate of the MFA fiction program at The New School. Her fiction work explores the relationship between man, magic, and nature. She has interviewed musicians across musical genres such as Ray Toro of My Chemical Romance and Beats Antique. Her National Book Critic Circle interviews with Ruth Franklin and Pulitzer Prize winner T.J. Stiles were featured on The New School writing blog. She is a frequent reader at TNS After Hours at KGB Bar. When she’s not writing, you can find her teaching yoga in New York City. If you smell sage burning, it’s probably her.