Blood and Guts in High School - Kathy Acker

A collage of letters, prose, poems and dream visions telling the story of a young girl called Janey. The story here is Janey's tragic life, but there is a lot more going on in this book than the story.

I have been putting off writing this post for a little while now. I just have been dreading trying to describe this book and put it into words, and I'm unsure of my opinion on this book. I don't know if it's high art, experimental genius or drivel, with some inspired moments. Maybe through writing this post I can get my thoughts together and reach some sort of conclusion.

So let's start with the story. This is the story of a young girl called Janey. She is in an incestuous relationship with her father, after her mother died when Janey was a year old ("Janey depended on her father for everything and regarded her father as boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement and father"). Her father has started seeing someone, and Janey is becoming jealous of her dad's girlfriend. After lots of stewing and advice from her father's friend, Janey decides to move to New York, where her father has enrolled her into school. He sends her money to start with, but stops when she lands a job in a bakery. Bear in mind at this point she is under 10 years old. Janey is then kidnapped and forced to be a prostitute, while locked in a room. She finds a piece of paper in the room, which is where she wrote the middle section of this book. While here she falls in love with her kidnapper and writes a series of poems about her captor. Eventually he sets her free, she falls in love with Jean Genet (a french playwright) and becomes a slave in Egypt.

You might think this gives you a taste for the style of this book - I don't think anything could prepare you for it. This book's writing and narrative is all over the place, and it really makes it a hard read. Paragraphs are repeated ad nauseam. Janey teaches herself Arabic, and writes whole pages in it. Letters are written to characters we don't know. There are several drawings of genitals. More than once, in fact frequently throughout the book, any grasp on reality that Janey has is lost completely. Any sense of coherence is forgotten, and we are reading Janey's disturbed thoughts as she thinks them, and get lost in her head. Pages and pages and pages are way out there, totally abstract. If you are planning to read this, hold on tight when you do - you'll get both barrels.

So certainly, I lost the thread of the narrative, and had to stop and think about what was happening, but this is no bad thing and obviously what Acker was going for. And while at times the words on the page felt nonsensical and were illogical, the feeling behind them was definitely shining through. There isn't always a lot of sense here, but there is a lot of heart and a lot of feeling. This is a post-modern post-punk classic, and rightly so.

There will undoubtedly be hundreds of themes you will read into with the book. Lots of symbolism, lots of questions raised. There's feminism and sexism and abuse and slavery and capitalism and adolescence and lots and lots of thinking about sex.

So I think I've reached a conclusion. At times, I'm 100% sure this book was over my head. But I enjoyed it. The writing was manic and hard to follow but I was absorbed by Janey and read the book in one sitting. So maybe I was thinking too hard, maybe I should have let it happen, so to speak.