There is a delightfully comic, head-in-the-sand logic at work here ... Processing reality through fiction is part of what good art helps us do, and Laing’s novel does it more explicitly than most ... That exuberance shows in the novel’s sentences, which rush by, fleet and frenetic, nearly tripping over the speed bumps of their own commas ... Laing has not entirely given up her biographer’s taste for burrowing inside other people’s skins, however. If Kathy is Laing’s alter ego, she is also an homage to Kathy Acker ... Acker herself was a first-rate stealer of other people’s writing, and Laing’s theft pays tribute in kind ... The risk of prose that tries to capture the sentiments of the immediate present is that it tends to take on the rubbery chew of an op-ed. Fortunately, Laing’s novel is too headlong for that. There is no sense of slowing the mad dash of the present to make it more comprehensible to some hypothetical future reader. For that reason, Crudo could turn out to be a novel that we pick up years from now to remind ourselves how these times felt ... Love may not be original, but this funny, fervent novel is.
Laing writes, in a tongue-in-cheek description, but elsewhere she portrays Kathy’s trawling solemnly ... When Kathy returns to England, Laing falls into a more convincing rhythm, handling the hairpin turns of her character’s consciousness and incorporating her stolen lines with new ease ... This high-strung book, which reads in turn like a roman à clef, a memoir, and a work of historical fiction set in the almost-present, turns, a little unexpectedly, into a love letter at the end. Somehow Laing pulls off this resolution, avoiding excessive corniness and maintaining the work’s rough texture of sutured quotations, even as she enters a lyrical free fall of earnest emotion ... Laing’s book is truly exciting and, crucially, right on time.
Sometimes, Kathy Acker is very present and masterfully referenced – the hatred of her breasts, the STDs, the live sex show, her mother’s suicide, the poor little rich girl, the creator of herself. Sometimes, it is Laing who is more present as we know her from her work, and sometimes it doesn’t matter at all who is talking, because Crudo seduces from the first sentence. Laing as Acker is not a literary device – it is literary detonation. Everything accelerates from there ... Laing’s prose shimmers and is selfish then, suddenly, full of love. It’s a high-wire act. This is the novel as a love letter to Acker. She gives her a happier ending than the one she had. She asks us what a novel can do when unreality rules. She asks what it is like to be alive when the old order is dying.
Going back and forth between ‘she’ and ‘I’, as if a non-fiction writer were reminding herself to inhabit a character from the inside, the prose is an engine not quite yet warmed to a purr. Or is it deliberately not purring: is it stuttering instead, punk-like in its refusal to keep to the rules of the novel, like the work of Kathy Acker? ... The novel doesn’t have one key, but several keys, with the last probably belonging to Laing herself...The confusion may be part of the appeal ... It could be the novel that has literary London in a tizz this summer isn’t for literary London at all, but written to explain something to one person only.
...slim and audacious ... Written with bristling intelligence, Crudo borrows liberally from Acker, a formal tribute to a master of appropriation ... Crudo revolves around a less extreme but equally crucial disjunction: between the ordinary life of Olivia Laing in 2017 and the extraordinary life of Kathy Acker in the second half of the last century ... As a result, the novel offers an altogether smoother ride than Acker’s fiction, both in its subject matter and its prose style ... It’s fair to say that the world of Crudo is somewhat cozier than the ’70s Downtown associated with Acker. At moments, the novel pokes deadpan fun at that divide.
The character is nominally Kathy Acker, but her life is Olivia Laing's. The best way to put this might be that Crudo is a memoir in drag. We get the outer trappings of Kathy Acker — her dead, dysfunctional mother; her breast cancer; her body of work — but Crudo starts in 2017, when Acker has been dead for twenty years, and the character's daily life and inner landscape are pure Laing ... You just have to roll with it — consider it a price of admission to a novel so breathless and gripping that it offers no reason for doubt.
Crudo is Laing’s slim first novel, and it’s less persuasive than her earlier work. Fiction, it seems, is a genre she’s still feeling her way into. This is a hard book to get a handle on ... In Acker fashion, Laing smuggles bits of text from other sources into Crudo, sometimes identifying these snippets as such but often not. (All citations are provided in an index.) ... Laing strikes some terrific chords in this novel ... Laing evokes the shattered, dreamlike quality of much of Acker’s work. Yet at moments the prose can be pretentious, verging on parody ... There’s a did-this, did-that quality to Crudo, a sense that everything matters yet nothing does, that can make one feel a bit ill, as if you’ve caught an intellectual and emotional flu, the way that being online too long can do. I suspect this was partly Laing’s intention.
In Crudo, Olivia Laing Kathy Ackers 'Kathy Acker' ... Through this bizarre and wholly unique lens, Laing tells an urgent, hyper contemporary tale about love and queerness in the age of political unrest and collapse ... Crudo is largely a plot less novel, as Kathy’s reflections on solitude, gender, and the current political climate are couched amidst the minutiae of wedding preparations, consuming food, and her travels with her soon to be husband ... The Internet is as much a character in this book as Kathy or her husband ... The book formally mimics this phenomenon, as the Internet itself has no plot or arc, and is just a series of mundane snippets of information punctuated by news of tragedy ... Crudo ends on a surprisingly optimistic and uplifting note.
Increasingly, you get the sense that the book wasn’t written for you anyway. Laing has 'rewired' it into a cosy short-circuit for those in the gang: those who believe the apocalypse is here, those who despise 'the endless malice of the polite right,' those who feel England is becoming 'unrecognisable, officially racist.' If you can’t join in with her squeamishly noble, fashionable fragility, then reading Crudo will feel like being cornered at a party by someone who seemed kind of interesting to start with.
Laing’s 'Kathy' is a declaration of her own debt to Acker. But the device feels insubstantial: the details that correspond to Acker’s life are so easily separable from those that correspond to Laing’s that Acker functions more like a band T-shirt than a mask, more fetish than disguise, a declaration of the author’s gang ... there is a bounciness and wit and honest self-regard here which the earnest seriousness of Laing’s non-fiction persona didn’t always feature. But this sprezzatura voice, for all its pleasure, risks being complacent too, of lacking the empathy for which it later seems to commend itself when considering refugees and racism ... it becomes clear that Crudo embodies the echo chamber rather than offers a critique of it. Perhaps that’s what Laing intends, but at the same time the novel appears anxious to offer political critique, and the result is a disingenuous tone in which the narrator seems to rejoice in the divisions of British society while simultaneously condemning them.
She has great curiosity and intelligence, and responds with intensity to the lives of others, especially in her sympathetic portraits of writers and artists. She sees things clearly, but her sanity is swamped with doubt, drawn to what’s on the edge, what’s dangerous ... This is a sweeter, kinder book, perhaps, than it quite wants to be. Kathy actually seems perfectly nice, or at least as nice as most of us, though she has her moments ... With its minimal development, Crudo perhaps feels a little thin after the satisfying thickness of Laing’s non-fiction, which is crammed so full with other people’s stories. It is story – the astonishing stuff that happens – that pegs open the space of fiction, gives it room to breathe. In Crudo her triumph, rather, is rendering on the page the texture of a very contemporary sensibility.
The most delicious moments in Crudo are not necessarily the direct quotes from Acker, which are attributed in the endnotes, but those that reflect a wry wickedness back on them both ... Laing’s novel does not shock. Laing/Acker bemoans her forays into conventionality and also cherishes them ... While critics have noted the current events in the novel, it spends as much time grappling with intimacy ... instead of knocking a writer off the stage, Olivia Laing has employed a subtler move and used Kathy Acker’s powerful voice to amplify her own.
Crudo is [Laing's] first work of fiction, written over seven weeks 'in real time,' keeping pace with the fast-changing nature of the modern news cycle as events unfolded online ... With Crudo, Laing appropriates Twitter’s trademark intonation, writing in a flippant and conversational voice, concise to the point of discarding nonessential punctuation. The novel feels cathartic, written in the breathless rush of a Twitter thread. Even Laing’s choice to juxtapose images of Kathy’s upscale Tuscan holiday in Val d’Orcia alongside the mounting horror of the news cycle portrays the experience of scrolling ... Yet current events are contrasted against quotidian life, which for Kathy means her impending nuptials — and her mounting anxiety over her relationship.
Ah, romance! Who wouldn’t like a sweet, sweeping love story right about now? But unfortunately, Kathy isn’t a terribly riveting heroine, proving herself insufferable nearly right out of the starting gate ... Next to Acker’s long shadow and the literature she has inspired, Crudo gives off little light. The fact that Laing wrote it in seven weeks has been touted almost as an act of experimentalism; the book’s dust jacket crows that its story 'unfolds in real time'... It doesn’t take a deep dive into that line to understand what’s meant: Crudo is diaristic, written, edited, and published quickly, and therefore its shortcomings, if not perceived as virtues, should be overlooked, excused ... Although Crudo, which just so happens to mean raw, was intended as such, it feels, in the end, merely half-baked.
Numbness is not what the narrator experiences; on the contrary, she’s alive to every emotion, experience and observation ... While it’s impossible to separate out the voices of author, narrator and Kathy, Crudo doesn’t seem to require that of the reader ... If the book was longer or had a more demanding plot, this might be too much to pull off, but at 150 pages (eight of them footnotes), the 'narrator' invites the reader to experience—without having to make sense of—the workings of a complex, highly anxious but impressively sensitive human being.
What emerges is a story as delicate as it is engrossing. In impressionistic yet precise language, Laing’s Kathy unspools herself ... It is in these interludes that feature the Internet that Laing’s powers of literary alchemy are most on display. In juxtaposing the almost-real Kathy Acker against an innovation not quite of her time, we are led to consider the question of who and what might be said to constitute an 'avant-garde' today ... While the juxtaposition of a later technological innovation against an early innovator works well in Crudo, the selection of the current political moment as the setting for the novel’s action works less so ... But there is magic in Crudo, and it lies in the care with which its narrative gathers the fragile yet knotted skeins of our desires; of wanting love and fretting over lost freedoms, of desiring the making of art that transcends even as we descend into the banalities of our daily lives.
With this brief, breathless experimental novel, Laing has left the world of literary nonfiction behind and planted an explorer's flag in an unusual, individual destination somewhere on the continent of fiction ... To enjoy this book, you have to stop trying to understand it. If you can, you may well experience a warm sense of recognition at the absurdity and impossibility of trying to carry on a life in these times. Mysterious, bizarre, frustrating, weirdly smart, and pretty cool.
Kathy’s thoughts—which are the novel’s sum and substance—are like those of an Acker character: moments of self-consciousness and anxiety aswirl with gloomy reflections on recent historical events ... Laing’s novel can be read as an account of one individual’s personal odyssey through a turbulent era defined by 'fire and fascism,' searching for peace. As in her nonfiction, Laing trenchantly depicts the life of the creative mind.
Crudo, Laing’s first novel...isn’t slow, or overly deliberate, and it doesn’t always feel planned out – but then, neither does the time in which we’re living. Isn’t that what everyone says? It feels experimental... It is on these latter points that Crudo is most affecting, and also most frustrating. Laing is eloquent and incisive on the essential strangeness of contemporary middle/upper-middle/upper-class life in the Western world.
