Crudo.

Olivia Laing’s debut novel Crudo is a waif of a novel, barely 135 pages long, and drops you right into the middle of an inner monologue of someone who may or may not be the writer Kathy Acker. The book won the 2019 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, a British literary prize that often picks winners from outside the mainstream, resulting in some brilliant choices (Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know; Zadie Smith’s White Teeth) and some maddening ones (this year’s winner, Ducks, Newburyport, is 1000 pages long and comprises one sentence).

Kathy Acker was a real author, a novelist, playwright, and essayist who wrote experimental, transgressive works dealing with topics like suicide, trauma, and sexual abuse, but she died of breast cancer after a double mastectomy in 1997, at the age of 50. She worked well outside the mainstream and had a hard time finding publishers; her best-known novel, Blood and Guts in High School, took almost a decade to see print, and that came via alternative publisher Grove Books. Wikipedia mentions that her friends included Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore, and her literary reputation has grown since her death.

Laing has brought her back to life, in a way, reimagining Acker as a breast cancer survivor, in the present day, but only around the age she was shortly before her death. This Acker uses social media and tracks the news, especially news of Trump and Brexit, almost obsessively, while also navigating her emotions as she approaches marriage to a man many years her senior. Both marriage, even though it will the “openish,” and the endless catastrophe of Trump’s reign of error terrify her. She views matrimony as an end to her freedom, perhaps to her autonomy, both of which could just as easily apply to her fears about the rising tide of nationalism, racism, and xenophobia that swept Trump into office and led British voters to twice choose economic self-immolation via Brexit.

Crudo walks us through the last few days before Acker’s marriage, through the circuitous thoughts in her mind as well as the extraordinary and mundane events that fill up the calendar. This Kathy Acker has lived as she pleased, and dreads the potential for that to change for any reason, more than she appears to fear death itself. The juxtaposition of the intensely personal and the publicly political works in Crudo‘s favor, by connecting something many readers (I’d wager most readers of this novel) themselves have felt with the less universal sense of marriage as a loss of something, which isn’t how everybody approaches the institution, at least.

The plot of Crudo, however, is as thin as the novel itself – a novella, really, if we want to be pedantic about the category, as there is very little to this book at all. It’s something you read for the prose, which is by turns lyrical and comically profane, or for the mood, but nothing really happens in the typical sense of a plot. There’s less than no action, conflicts are observed rather than experienced, and no character other than Kathy gets much page time, let alone development. I read it, I sort of enjoyed it, and I carried on living my life. It’s different, and perhaps that’s why it won the Tait Black Prize, but it’s not the sort of groundbreaking work the prize ostensibly seeks to honor.

Next up: I’m nearly through David Mitchell’s number9dream.