Near the end of Crudo, the book’s protagonist, Kathy, is having a conversation about plagiarism, which doesn’t concern her, and we get this: “You take what you find, it’s all material, I mean what is art if it’s not plagiarising the world?” (121). Which is a pretty good thesis statement for the novel as a whole, which is full of bits of actual life: people’s tweets, bits of news headlines, details from Kathy Acker’s life and quotes from her writing, and details from Olivia Laing’s life, too: moments from the summer of 2017, twined with fiction to make a novel about the anxieties of that particular moment, both globally/politically and personally for the protagonist (who is on the verge of marriage when the book opens and not sure she’s suited to it). It was interesting to read this book so soon after I read Laing’s The Lonely City: the proximity in time of my reading experiences made the points of overlap between the texts stand out to me—little things like references to Basquiat, or the Alphabet City location of Ninth Street Espresso, but also bigger themes of how people relate to each other.
I liked both books, but I liked Crudo more, the style and pacing of it, the narrative playfulness, the prickliness of the protagonist. (From page 2: “Was Kathy nice? Unclear.”) So, plotwise: Kathy is 40; Kathy is getting married. Kathy and her husband-to-be are in Italy together, and then in England, where they live. They are preparing for their wedding, and Kathy is preparing for a trip to New York, and it kind of feels like the world might end. I like how the narrative looks at Kathy’s personal happiness and how it contrasts with her unease with the state of the world and also looks at her personal unease, the question not only of how to be happy/in love when it seems like the world is falling apart, but also the question of how to be happy/in love when one is perhaps a difficult person, and when solitude/loneliness has been, or has seemed to be, a key part of one’s identity. I like passages like this:
You think you know yourself inside out when you live alone, but you don’t, you believe you are a calm untroubled or at worst melancholic person, you do not realise how irritable you are, how any little thing, the wrong kind of touch or tone, a lack of speed in answering a question, a particular cast of expression will send you into apoplexy because you are unchill, because you have not learnt how to soften your borders, how to make room. You’re selfish and rigid and absorbed, you’re like an infant. (65-66)
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