autofiction

The Hero of this Book.

Elizabeth McCracken’s Bowlaway was my favorite novel of 2019, an intoxicatingly humanist novel that loved its characters in all their eccentricities. The Hero of this Book is her newest novel, her first since then, a brief but dazzling work of autofiction – a charge the narrator denies – as McCracken uses her gift to grapple with her grief after the death of her mother.

The narrator is McCracken, or it isn’t, or most likely it’s both, and she takes pains to convince us both ways, but regardless, her mother has died, and she has gone to London to revisit some of the places she’d been with her mother, and some new places, as she remembers her mother’s life and deals with her own grief. The narrator’s mother was a fascinating woman in the retelling, coming in just a shade under five feet tall, facing physical difficulties through just about her entire life, marrying a difficult man, and, as far as I can tell, getting her money’s worth out of life even with everything it threw at her. She sounds like a real kick.

The trip through London, which all takes place in a single day within the book, is part framing device but also parallels the peripatetic nature of memory, especially how your memories of a parent may span decades (if everyone involved is so fortunate). The narrator walks around London, Joyce-like, while dancing back and forth between the present and her memories of her mother, the way a painter might move around a canvas without apparent purpose, only for a complete picture to emerge once the painting is nearly finished. Her mother appears to have been an extremely interesting person, a Jewish woman raised in Iowa with a twin sister, often confused for someone from all manner of ‘exotic’ origins due in part to her vantablack hair. The portrait of her mother arises as an accumulation of these details, how she looked, how she walked, things she liked, things of which she didn’t approve. Her mother liked cats. She told the cats she loved them. She almost never told her daughter that. You should already feel the outlines of the character forming just from those three sentences. It’s a clinic on character development – and McCracken, who teaches writing at the University of Texas-Austin, throws in many little notes on how to write better characters, as well as other tips for the would-be author, even after telling readers not to trust any writer who does such a thing. (She also offers this wonderful, pithy quote that I haven’t been able to stop pondering since I read the book: “An unpublished book is an ungrounded wire.”)

McCracken’s own mother hated memoirs as well, and the author had promised her mum that she’d never turn her into a character in one of her books, so what exactly The Hero of this Book is remains an unanswered question. It’s fiction, so it can’t be a memoir; the details of the narrator’s mother adhere so much to the details of the author’s mother that, well, isn’t it a memoir? “A narrative composed from personal experience,” sayeth Merriam-Webster, which, if not the authority on the meanings of words, is certainly an authority, and the one with the best Twitter account. Then this book is a memoir. I prefer the term “autofiction,” although the narrator here not only rejects the term, but salts the soil beneath it with her scorn, saying it sounds like something a robot would write – if only she knew that ChatGPT was coming. Or perhaps she did. It wouldn’t surprise me.

That elusive quality is The Hero of this Book’s strongest feature – it is brief, and yet it manages to confound you in a delightful way. It doesn’t try to bounce between genres, but exists between them, occupying spaces you didn’t realize existed. With McCracken’s lovely prose, which once again shines with wit and heart (“I have no interest in ordinary people, having met so few of them in my life”), it’s a delight from start to finish. I have no idea what’s even in the running for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which will be announced in about three weeks, but I’ll be pulling for this one to win.

Next up: Percival Everett’s Dr. No, itself a Pulitzer candidate and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Fiction award last month.

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.

The Hero of this Book.

Crudo.

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