Rating: 4/5
Review:
Partly brilliant, partly unreadable
This is an extraordinary book which, frankly, I’m struggling to describe, never mind review or even rate. Parts of it are brilliant, parts of it are unreadable nonsense. It’s a fractured, provocative mess which nonetheless has the ghost of a narrative running through it and which says some important angry, and powerful things about sexism and the treatment of women, capitalism, selfishness, the Olympian self-regard and self-obsession of The Great Artist and so on. The trouble is that it’s such a disjointed, chaotic shambles that it’s not always easy to keep track of exactly what important things are being said.
The story (if it is a story) is of Janey whom we meet aged ten while living with her father in Mexico and having a violent sexual relationship with him. Parts of the book are narrated by Janey herself (in a voice more like a 25-year-old than a 10-year-old), others are in the third person, tenses change at random, there are sections of blank verse, parts are written as scenes from a play...like I say, chaotic – and deliberately so. In disjointed episodes, Janey goes to New York, joins a gang, drops out, gets a job, is kidnapped as a slave and prostitute, gets cancer, goes to Tunisia where she meets and has an affair with Jean Genet (Janey/Genet – get it?), has obsessive fantasies about Jimmy Carter...you get the idea.
Throughout all this, she is obsessed with sex, which is usually violent. There is a lot of extremely explicit language and a number of extremely explicit drawings, and there is no doubt that Kathy Acker set out to shock and disturb. Janey says at one point, “Writers create what they do out of their own frighful agony and blood and mushed-up guts and horrible mixed up insides.” Well, that’s certainly what this feels like, and perhaps this is a portrait of the mind a young woman having grown up with severe sexual abuse. Among the agony and mushed-up guts there are also gems of angry insight like “Nouveau-Riche Woman (to the rebels): You rebels are so fashionable. You dress in the most cunningly torn rags. Where can I buy rags just like yours?”, and in a long, semi-coherent passage of near-nonsense there may be a tiny gem of simple reality like “My thoughts hurt me all the time. They are the truth.”
This certainly isn’t for the faint of heart and it’s something I might have expected to hate – but I didn’t. I had to skim parts, but it has left a very powerful impression, I’m very glad to have read it and I can recommend giving it a try.
The story (if it is a story) is of Janey whom we meet aged ten while living with her father in Mexico and having a violent sexual relationship with him. Parts of the book are narrated by Janey herself (in a voice more like a 25-year-old than a 10-year-old), others are in the third person, tenses change at random, there are sections of blank verse, parts are written as scenes from a play...like I say, chaotic – and deliberately so. In disjointed episodes, Janey goes to New York, joins a gang, drops out, gets a job, is kidnapped as a slave and prostitute, gets cancer, goes to Tunisia where she meets and has an affair with Jean Genet (Janey/Genet – get it?), has obsessive fantasies about Jimmy Carter...you get the idea.
Throughout all this, she is obsessed with sex, which is usually violent. There is a lot of extremely explicit language and a number of extremely explicit drawings, and there is no doubt that Kathy Acker set out to shock and disturb. Janey says at one point, “Writers create what they do out of their own frighful agony and blood and mushed-up guts and horrible mixed up insides.” Well, that’s certainly what this feels like, and perhaps this is a portrait of the mind a young woman having grown up with severe sexual abuse. Among the agony and mushed-up guts there are also gems of angry insight like “Nouveau-Riche Woman (to the rebels): You rebels are so fashionable. You dress in the most cunningly torn rags. Where can I buy rags just like yours?”, and in a long, semi-coherent passage of near-nonsense there may be a tiny gem of simple reality like “My thoughts hurt me all the time. They are the truth.”
This certainly isn’t for the faint of heart and it’s something I might have expected to hate – but I didn’t. I had to skim parts, but it has left a very powerful impression, I’m very glad to have read it and I can recommend giving it a try.
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