Talk to Crudo like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
Crudo is a novel written in real time, in the summer of 2017, about a woman named Kathy — who is also Kathy Acker — getting married. The novel was drafted in seven weeks during a period when Brexit was ongoing, Trump had just taken office, and the news cycle was an unceasing disaster. Laing made a formal choice to write the book as the summer unfolded, not revising the political context or the narrator's anxious responses to it, and the result is a book that feels genuinely uncontrolled — which is either its greatest achievement or its most off-putting quality, depending on what you want from fiction.
Kathy — simultaneously a forty-year-old writer based in London and the ghost of Kathy Acker, the American avant-garde novelist who died in 1997 — is approaching her own wedding with ambivalence and terror that have nothing to do with the specific man she's marrying and everything to do with what commitment means for a person whose identity is built on freedom. The wedding plot, such as it is, is thin. What the novel is actually doing is tracking a consciousness moving through a moment of global anxiety: checking Twitter, watching politicians lie, reading headlines about hurricanes and nuclear brinksmanship, trying to figure out how to be present in a world that keeps demanding your attention and then rewarding it with horror.
What it gets right
- 1.
The novel's central formal bet is that unrevised real-time writing can capture something about anxiety that polished retrospective narration cannot.
- 2.
Kathy Acker's ghost haunts the novel as a version of female freedom — transgressive, self-invented, ultimately mortal — that the narrator is measuring herself against.
- 3.
Marriage in the novel is not a romantic resolution but a philosophical problem: what does commitment mean for a self that has defined itself by refusal of constraint?
What it covers
Who wrote it
Olivia Laing is a British writer and critic whose work moves across nonfiction, fiction, and cultural commentary. Her nonfiction books include To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring, The Lonely City, and Everybody: A Book About Freedom. She is widely regarded as one of the most distinctive essayists in contemporary British letters, known for a style that weaves personal history with cultural history and close reading. Crudo is her debut novel, published in 2018. She also writes regularly for The Guardian and other publications and is a qualified psychotherapist.
