Crudo by Olivia Laing review – mingling the personal and political (original) (raw)
What a writer does – tentatively at first and then, as time goes on and the word count adds up, with more confidence and force – is establish a place for herself where she’s at home. She creates a writing-self in both her style and subject matter. Olivia Laing has been doing that across her three non-fiction books and now she’s trying out the novel; her writing personality feels continuous between her non-fiction and fiction. She has great curiosity and intelligence, and responds with intensity to the lives of others, especially in her sympathetic portraits of writers and artists. She sees things clearly, but her sanity is swamped with doubt, drawn to what’s on the edge, what’s dangerous. This slippery mix of reasonableness and self-doubt feels very English; at the beginning of her first book, _To the River (_2011), she worries that she’s “too dry in myself, too English”. The worry in itself is characteristic and appealing.
In To the River she follows the River Ouse from its source to the sea, writing beautifully about the landscape and using it as a prompt for digressions personal and historical, as well as for meditations on Virginia Woolf’s drowning. In The Trip to Echo Spring she draws together six male American writers who were alcoholics, and in The Lonely City she searches in New York for the meaning of loneliness through the lives of artists – Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger, David Wojnarowicz. There is always something of Laing’s own life in the mix: broken relationships with men, or years of living as a child with her mother’s alcoholic partner, or following a lover to New York where he abandoned her. The change of focus in her books, from rural England to metropolitan America, feels crucial; she instinctively knew that judicious middle-class Englishness needed an injection of American crazy. Of course ironic, inhibited Englishness isn’t any kind of inoculation against unhappiness, instability or alcoholism – far from it. But a certain English sensibility, with its dryness and know-how, can fit these days like too tight a skin; all English authors have to fight their way past that. The epigraph for Laing’s first book is from Ecclesiastes, and her Ouse journey took in the Andredesleage, a lost ancient woodland, along with the dead of the Battle of Lewes in 1264. By the time she arrives in The Lonely City she has shed that burden of ancientness and long perspectives. Her references have a new contemporaneity: Hopper’s work is about as old as it gets.
All the crudest, most violent things in Crudo come from Kathy Acker. Photograph: Lentati/ANL/REX/Shutterstock
So it makes sense that for her protagonist and narrator in Crudo, Laing has self-confessedly used a composite of elements from her own life and from the life of punk writer and counterculture provocateur Kathy Acker: between them these elements compose the writing persona. She calls her Kathy, too. All the crudest, most violent things in Crudo come from Acker, with borrowings acknowledged at the end: not only the language-shocks (“My life is delicate – more delicate than my cunt”), but the apparatus of extremes and disasters: family wealth, a mother’s suicide, a double mastectomy. Acker, too, stole stories from other people and used them as her own – it wasn’t cheating, it was a new way of thinking about personality and its permeability.
The story in Laing’s novel is fairly minimal: Kathy, who has been wild in her youth, is in her 40s now, and perhaps it’s time for some stability – she’s going to get married to a man much older than herself. This comes from Laing’s recent past: last year she married the writer Ian Patterson, previously married to the late Jenny Diski. Kathy is in love, she’s sure her husband is a good and lovable man. He’s English, he knows things and understands things, he relays to her the funny conversations he overhears while they’re on holiday, talks to himself “in a low confiding tone, offering exhortation and encouragement” while he’s cooking. She’s excited about embarking on a new life, but also dismayed by what she might be giving up – solitude and selfishness, adventures. It’s difficult, incidentally, to imagine the real Acker choosing to marry such a man, but perhaps that’s beside the point. What an irony that bad Kathy is going to get married, of all things! Why not just try living together?
The novel is almost a dialogue staged between the two parts of Laing’s writing persona, the judicious and the crazy. On the one hand, there’s the allure of a dream of perpetual youth, behaving badly and moving on to the promise of the next relationship; on the other, the relief and bathos of “growing up”, choosing furniture and paint for your home, having to take someone else into consideration all the time. Getting married is Kathy’s test, and the test must be momentous – a contract, a sacrament even – not just another whim. The wedding plans are tinged with a slightly hysterical irony, trying out a performance to see whether it can hold, whether she can not only carry it off but also mean it. (“On the original question, is Kathy nice, it’s looking like probably no.”) And they do get married, and Kathy has her moments of panic, lest it’s all been a disastrous mistake.
Her husband’s sad eyes upset her but also infuriated her, she detested being responsible for anyone else’s happiness. Like can’t you just figure out what you need and get it? Why do you have to keep asking me?
After a few months, however – by the end of the novel, when she embarks on a trip to America without him – she feels sure. “She waited for her flight. She loved him, she loved him. Love is the world, pain is the world_.”_
This is a sweeter, kinder book, perhaps, than it quite wants to be. Kathy actually seems perfectly nice, or at least as nice as most of us, though she has her moments (when she and her husband come home, for instance, to find the decking has been painted the wrong colour, and she screams). At the end of _The Lonely City_’s exploration of urban anomie Laing is hopeful, too, and her last word on loneliness is that it’s the result of “stigma and exclusion”, not an existential condition: “What matters is solidarity.” Hopefulness and kindness are her authentic writing self, better than any parade of disabusedness.
With its minimal development, Crudo perhaps feels a little thin after the satisfying thickness of Laing’s non-fiction, which is crammed so full with other people’s stories. It is story – the astonishing stuff that happens – that pegs open the space of fiction, gives it room to breathe. In Crudo her triumph, rather, is rendering on the page the texture of a very contemporary sensibility. Kathy’s observations and reactions are tumbled together in her sentences, with her dreams and her endless internet trawling, her eating and drinking and her reactions to contemporary news events – Trump’s election, the rise of the populist right – happening as the book was being written. The novel form famously struggles to represent the intersection in our lives of the personal-parochial and the political-global: here’s a way to try. And the writing is often so fresh and clever and funny.
She was experiencing one of those occasional upswells of love, when she suddenly felt satiated on a neurological and also soulful level, enough and not too much pleasant information saturating the synapses in her brain.
Tessa Hadley’s Bad Dreams and Other Stories is published by Vintage. To buy Crudo for £11.04 go to guardianbookshop.com.