Reviewed by Rachel Veroff

May 13, 2017: This is the date that Olivia Laing’s new novel Crudo opens. The heroine, Kathy, has just gotten off a plane from New York, and she is “crazy as a bedbug.” She is getting married. Kathy has written several books—including Great Expectations and Blood and Guts in High School—and she expects you to have heard of them. (They are, in fact, titles by the real-life Kathy Acker, who died in 1997, and whose writings and letters are liberally quoted in the pages of Crudo.) Fans of Acker will recognize the punk poet’s voice immediately: youthful, irreverent, manic, hilarious. Fans of Olivia Laing’s distinctive style, on the other hand, will need to pause after the first page, take a deep breath, and marvel at how ambitious this endeavor is. In so expertly channeling Acker, Laing has not only demonstrated her amazing versatility as a writer, but also offered a surprising guide for our times.