Olivia Laing has been deservedly lauded for her thoughtful works of non-fiction To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring and The Lonely City. Her first novel, Crudo, is every bit as intelligent and provocative, with a roar of energy that comes from having been written, remarkably, in just seven weeks.
Perhaps the novel’s most unusual element is its narrator: ‘Kathy by which I mean I’ is a 40-year-old hybrid of the post-punk icon Kathy Acker and a fictionalised version of Laing herself. Acker died in 1997, but Laing brings her back to life for the politically turbulent summer of 2017. She peppers her prose with quotations from Acker’s writing and merges episodes from Acker’s life, such as her repeated breast cancer and her mother’s suicide, with Laing’s recent marriage to the poet Ian Patterson. All of this is cloaked in a contemporary reality of news stories and Twitter.
This strange Laing-Acker hybrid is part of Crudo’s elastic world.
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