PositiveHyperallergicSchloss’s story isn’t—as a conventional autobiography would tell it—straight history. Instead, using an approach adopted by Modernist art-world memoirists like Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, The Loft Generation is nonlinear and associative ... Schloss’s project—edited into book form by a creative team that included her son, Jacob Burckhardt, and Schloss’s Italian editor, Mary Venturi—doesn’t serve up comforting nostalgia for gritty old New York, either. The memoir is steeped in granular physical details and is blunt about its ambivalences, even those leavened with humorous anecdotes ... So absorbed as it is by its motley cast of characters, the memoir downplays facts about its author’s life, details that are filled in through a preface ... The Loft Generation recuperates iconoclasts whose contemporaneous influence on the era of her peers has dimmed in these intervening decades ... As in so much of its finely distilled prose, The Loft Generation creates here another mirror-memoir, as literary portraiture doubles as veiled self-portraiture, and the high-wire creative risks taken by others are always partly Schloss’s own doing, too.
