July 1, 2018
The political and personal chaos of the summer of 2017 as it tumbles through the consciousness of a writer named Kathy.With this brief, breathless experimental novel, Laing (The Lonely City, 2016, etc.) has left the world of literary nonfiction behind and planted an explorer's flag in an unusual, individual destination somewhere on the continent of fiction. The narrative begins with Kathy's arrival in England on a plane from New York. She is met by her fiance, who we will eventually learn is also a writer, 29 years older than she. At this early point in the story, there is also another man in her life, but this turns out to be no big deal--that kind of plot is not the focus here, though Kathy will at some point get married and, at some time after that, will actually fall in love. A focus at least as prominent as this "love story" is creating a record of the ongoing avalanche of terrible news that characterizes this time in the age of Trump and Brexit, the threat of war with North Korea, various terrorist incidents, murders of innocents, Steve Bannon's resignation, etc. Another major concern is the overlap of the narrator with the character of the late transgressive feminist writer Kathy Acker. Since the real Kathy Acker died in 1997, this Kathy can't be that Kathy, but on the first page of the book, she is credited with writing Acker's books, and lines from Acker's work are woven through the text and footnoted at the end. This Kathy is close to that Kathy in body and spirit. "The best thing about breast cancer was the double mastectomy, lop them both off she said, I'd always hated them. Hair cropped, skinny, flat-chested, she was a lovely dickless boy, a wrinkling Dorian Gray, finding her jewels....She was indeterminate and oversexed, a hot chrysalis, and if she'd had a dick you better believe it would be perfect, at least as good as David Bowie's." To enjoy this book, you have to stop trying to understand it. If you can, you may well experience a warm sense of recognition at the absurdity and impossibility of trying to carry on a life in these times.Mysterious, bizarre, frustrating, weirdly smart, and pretty cool.

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July 16, 2018
“Avant-garde, middle-class-in-flight” is the way Kathy, modeled on experimental novelist Kathy Acker and the heroine of this penetrating debut novel from biographer and memoirist Laing, thinks of herself. Unlike Acker, who died at age 50 in 1997, this Kathy is age 40 in 2017 and is getting ready to marry her boyfriend. As the tale toggles back and forth between Rome and Manhattan, present and past, Laing (The Lonely City)—who laces her narrative with phrases subtly quoted from Acker’s texts—fantasizes about how the author might have reacted to the age of Twitter (“her scrying glass”), Facebook, Instagram, and information overload. Kathy’s thoughts—which are the novel’s sum and substance—are like those of an Acker character: moments of self-consciousness and anxiety aswirl with gloomy reflections on recent historical events including the Trump presidency; Brexit; nuclear proliferation in North Korea; the Grenfell Tower fire in London; the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Va.; and so on. The world that Kathy moves in is, like that in Joyce’s Ulysses, full of touchstones for intimate memories and reveries. Laing’s novel can be read as an account of one individual’s personal odyssey through a turbulent era defined by “fire and fascism,” searching for peace. As in her nonfiction, Laing trenchantly depicts the life of the creative mind. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

August 1, 2018

The days leading up to the summer 2017 wedding of Kathy, a New Yorker living in London, to an Englishman almost 30 years her senior are punctuated by news of underground nuclear testing in North Korea, floods in Houston, the Grenfell Tower fire, and much ado about President Donald Trump. In Italy, before the wedding, the couple mingle with a well-heeled crowd before returning to London to finesse the wedding and their future together. The details of the fictional Kathy's life bear more than a passing resemblance to those of the late novelist and poet Kathy Acker, with extensive quotes from Acker's actual writing, and include an absent father, a mother who committed suicide, private school girlhood, and a double mastectomy. The jazzy stream-of-consciousness writing perfectly suits this zippy novel about people living comfortable lives surrounded by unsettling Instagram images. VERDICT As Acker was known for basing much of her work on the writing of others, so Laing (The Trip to Echo Spring; The Lonely City) similarly appropriates Acker's life as the basis for this clever work. [See Prepub Alert, 3/12/18.]--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

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