Rollercoaster ride

Olivia Laing’s first novel Crudo is a pint-sized dynamite. Written feverishly over seven weeks, it crunches the mayhem and madness of the Trump and Twitter era into 100-odd pages of sharp, scathing prose. If that isn’t tempestuous enough, Laing’s protagonist is a curious amalgam of the American punk poet and author Kathy Acker, who died of cancer 20 years ago, and Laing herself.

“Kathy, by which I mean I, was getting married. Kathy, by which I mean I, had just got off a plane from New York.” Crudo begins thus, with an assertion designed to confuse. For as much as we see Kathy (Laing never mentions her surname), the author of Great Expectations and Blood and Guts in High School , a Dickensian orphan “who lived off hustle and her books”, and who battled cancer twice, we also find Laing. The 40-year-old writer who married poet Ian Patterson in the summer of 2017, pops up often. Laing had written warmly, and honestly, in The Times about coming to terms with intimacy, marriage and commitment, of falling in love with Patterson, who is almost three decades her senior, fears of loss as well as the sense of epiphany when she watched Patterson’s blood-drained face after a knee-replacement surgery. Much of that is in the novel too. Crudo has elements of autofiction, yet is not strictly one.

Laing speaks in a refreshingly new voice in Crudo — a restless, impish, wacky one, a departure from the steady, studied tenor of her non-fiction. In To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface , she had travelled the length of the Ouse, the river in which writer Virginia Woolf had drowned herself. The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (2016) had become a handbook of sorts for the lonely multitudes in vast cities, as Laing deftly repositioned “loneliness as a natural human state” rather than a stigma or taboo, and dissected its impact on artistes.

Her non-fiction came on the back of meticulous research; Crudo appears more on impulse. In an interview to the London Evening Standard , Laing talked of the parallel thoughts that led to the novel. “There was Brexit, Trump, changes in the laws. I was trying to write down what was going on every day. Also I was about to get married and in this weird antechamber of learning how to be intimate. That felt like it needed to be recorded in minute detail.” She was also reading After Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus’s biography of the author. “Kathy Acker was a plagiarist. Her style was to steal things and switch them around … I wondered what would happen if I took Acker’s life and put it in the first person,” she said.

Crudo is this potent mix — Acker air-dropped into 2017 and captured in real time, living through the tumult of Trump, Kim Jong-un, Brexit and Charlottesville, all the while struggling with intimacy and commitment. Laing imbues the novel with an edge as well as certain lightness. She dedicates it to Patterson and Kathy, and follows it up with an unusual note: “The cheap 12 inch sq. marble tiles behind speaker at UN always bothered me. I will replace with beautiful large marble slabs if they ask me.” The observation sets the tone; Crudo rides on an irreverent and heady energy.

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Crudo means raw, uncooked; the novel lives up to its name. Acker thrived in the outlandish and Laing borrows a handful of her cutting comments and sews them in seamlessly. The narrative often reads like diary entries, and is alive because it is sharp and unapologetic. Laing is relentlessly dispatching little sticky notes on Kathy, letting the reader build her up, bit by bit. Hence, “Kathy had no parents, which didn’t stop them annoying her.” “Kathy was always lying, she’d lied since she was a small child with unattractive red hair.” Then Laing throws in this: “Was Kathy nice? Unclear. Kathy was interested in her tan, she was interested in Twitter, she was interested in seeing whether any of her friends were having a better holiday than her.”

Split into five parts, Crudo is Kathy’s life mostly between August 2 and September 23, 2017. It traverses a small arc, a pertinent, internal one for Kathy. The disarray of the outside world, however, is more tangible. Crises crash into each other head-on, set forth confusion and give Kathy a headache. “The internet was excited because the President had just sacked someone. Got fired, divorced, had a baby, and fired in ten days. Like a fruit fly, some joker wrote. 56,152 likes. None of it was funny, or may be it all was.” On the day of Kathy’s wedding, someone shouts, “Steve Bannon’s resigned.” Crudo inhabits a dense canvas. Events tumble out cataclysmically — Comey resigns, Houston is flooded, the stand-off with North Korea is perilously poised.

Laing builds a world that is falling apart, a sense Kathy shares about herself. She feels “a sense of ground being parcelled beneath her.” On other days she is like a helium balloon, untethered, barely attached. She is often on the brink, much like the world. Only Kathy manages to get a grip. “Just let me learn love is more than me,” she says. Crudo can be a bit too breathless, but it perfectly fits the time.

Published on August 31, 2018