It's the summer of 2017. Amid North Korean nuclear detonations, hurricanes, presidential tweets, Brexit, White House firings, Internet rage, Charlottesville, an earthquake in Mexico, political tension in Spain, an eclipse--Kathy is getting married. She feels conflicted about her wedding, and as she counts down to the date, she consumes current events online, news that washes over her like a saturated sponge.
British author Olivia Laing's first novel follows a fictionalized Kathy Acker in a year when the apocalypse seems nigh. Laing's writing is urgent and lyrical, with short, tightly crafted sentences that can be read as slowly as poetry or as quickly as tweets. She repurposes quotes from Acker's writing, which adds another layer to the narrative; Acker used them to describe the '80s, and they are just as meaningful in 2017.
Throughout, Liang (The Lonely City) captures both the anxiety and detachment of the time. She writes, "Kathy was becoming obsessed with the numbness, the way the news cycle was making her incapable of action, a beached somnolent whale." The end of the world and beginning of a marriage are both ways to think about our own mortality, and Liang, in less than 150 pages, asks: How is it possible to love, to even think, in a society on the brink of collapse? Crudo is a time capsule that will become even more meaningful with age. --Katy Hershberger, freelance writer and bookseller