“Sex and Rage is less controlled, and in my view, a more interesting work from Babitz. Jacaranda shares some of her biographical markers but not all of them, giving her room to experiment. And though the book is plotless, told in vignettes, and this will bedevil some readers, there is something about its portrait of an It Girl on the verge of a nervous breakdown that softens and opens the type … All that allure, that veneer of endless cool, it can be a little intimidating. But Babitz is up to something more interesting by the time she plants Jacaranda in the legendary New York artist’s watering hole called Elaine’s. Jacaranda looks around that room with ambivalence. ‘In Elaine’s it was almost impossible to pull off being incredibly beautiful and splashy and fabulous,’ she remarks. It fits, because most of Sex and Rage seems to be about the difficulty of pulling off that It Girl illusion too.”
–Michelle Dean, The Los Angeles Times, July 7, 2017
Read more of Michelle’s reviews here
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