By now, no one needs me to go on and on about the Christ-shaped shadow Kurt Cobain cast over the CD generation, so I’m going to blow my wad on a different idea: that besides being the most important recording artist of the last thirty years, the Washington state kid with the voice of an immolating angel and a broken-hearted life as likely prolonged by heroin as shortened by it was the ultimate writer’s rock star. Intelligent, introverted, insecure, at best wry and ambivalent in the spotlight, at worst a bitter, shame-filled liar, the irony of his instant crowning as the voice of a generation was that his music was made for arguments with yourself held behind a closed bedroom door. Which of course made him perfect for his unwanted role; who else to speak for the generation coming of age in a world-devouring culture fully aware that it was the problem, whose primary rebellion would be a refusal to participate in anything without doubling as their own audience-nudging fool? “A denial,” he sang, mocking himself to the bone. “A denial.” I was thirteen, he was already dead, and I was in my room every night trying to somehow posess myself with him because it was the only thing that made any sense to do. I probably wasn’t even the only one on my street.
Written in a sorcerous visual prose that invokes Cobain’s lyrics and the album and video art of In Utero-period Nirvana (both of which were all but entirely of Cobain provenance), Lynn Crosbie’s new novel, Where Did You Sleep Last Night, takes that teenaged instinct to ingest the artist that’s making you into you all the way to the poster-wrapped wall. An attempted suicide lands grunge witchling Evelyn in a coma, where through sheer force of fantasy she manifests Kurt back into being in the form of the overdosed boy in the next bed. The pages that describe their fusion of minds, a kind of magic enabled by the twinned nature of their maladies and an unethical nurse who opiates them into a heaven straight out of Nirvana’s “Dumb,” is simultaneously the most surreal depiction of falling in love I’ve ever read and the truest. The bloodiest of lovers know that the kind of romance that from two people lunges itself whole into the world is a third being, a protean hybrid of place and self which inflicts its own will onto the hearts of its makers. In locating the birth of Evelyn and Kurt’s (renamed Celine Black by Evelyn herself, finalizing her creation) love in a liminal space created out of their paired subconscious, Crosbie brilliantly literalizes the wild world-building that happens when creative people fall deeply in love.
Where Did You Sleep Last Night is love story as ejaculatory teenaged fever-dream, warping realism into something closer to what its bright-burning protagonists could recognize as reality. From the hospital, to the psych ward, to the scarred stages of punk-rock legend, Evelyn and Celine reenact the feedback-pitched drama of Kurt and Courtney like a kind of tragic ritual, hurtling through tours, overdoses, rehabs and meltdowns, only to retreat again and again into the creative/destructive womb of their rotten love. According to interviews, Crosbie, inspired by Cobain fan fiction she’d read online, initially conceived of the book as a young adult novel, only to have it bloom into this rough beast. It’s a blessing—the material is too rabid and joyful to be muzzled, and the teens that YA ostensibly serves deserve better—but the violent-hearted emotion remains, as do the plot absurdities, which, removed from their usual YA context, serve to heighten the sense that this story is taking place somewhere in the layer of reality that forms between the forehead of a fifteen-year-old in her bedroom blowing up her heart on music and the record sleeve propped against her knees.
It’s tough to criticize a novel that lands all its blows right where it aims them, and with such joyful style. So instead of a criticism, all I can offer is a complaint. From the age of about thirteen to maybe sixteen or seventeen, my sense of spiritual identification with Kurt Cobain—or at least the one I believed I knew through long, long small-town nights spent staring at the ceiling while his guitar and voice winged and staggered around my tiny basement room—was so intense that I honestly believe what I heard as his music may have significantly shaped the landscape of my relationship with the world, the same way hands will shape the handles of very old tools, or asses the couches that endure them.
The way I respond to the raw and authentic and powerfully felt over the poised and controlled, the way I, deep-down, still assume that to create something honest—even if only for a moment, live, that will pass and be gone—will offer redemption of a kind that cannot be negated, not even by pain so hideously alive that a shotgun becomes mercy. The way I always trust the troubled more than the untroubled, the way I’d rather forgive than merely admire… Maybe Kurt didn’t teach me these things, but somehow nightly bathing myself in those sounds at that humming, sensitive age was like placing myself in a furnace that glazed them onto my bones. I’m saying this only because Where Did You Sleep Last Night isn’t for the thirty-four-year-old me, who wants to know how and why that is, and how it works, what it means for me now. It’s for the fifteen-year-old with the record who just wants to be there with him in that world between head and sleeve, because it’s the truest place they know. In taking us there, Lynn Crosbie has conducted a kind of ritual that feels somehow essential for anyone who stepped through the door from childhood to youth by putting on a record. It’s a great book, and possibly something even rarer in CanLit—a book that does something new.
Anansi | 256 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1770899315
‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’ by Lynn Crosbie
Book Reviews
By now, no one needs me to go on and on about the Christ-shaped shadow Kurt Cobain cast over the CD generation, so I’m going to blow my wad on a different idea: that besides being the most important recording artist of the last thirty years, the Washington state kid with the voice of an immolating angel and a broken-hearted life as likely prolonged by heroin as shortened by it was the ultimate writer’s rock star. Intelligent, introverted, insecure, at best wry and ambivalent in the spotlight, at worst a bitter, shame-filled liar, the irony of his instant crowning as the voice of a generation was that his music was made for arguments with yourself held behind a closed bedroom door. Which of course made him perfect for his unwanted role; who else to speak for the generation coming of age in a world-devouring culture fully aware that it was the problem, whose primary rebellion would be a refusal to participate in anything without doubling as their own audience-nudging fool? “A denial,” he sang, mocking himself to the bone. “A denial.” I was thirteen, he was already dead, and I was in my room every night trying to somehow posess myself with him because it was the only thing that made any sense to do. I probably wasn’t even the only one on my street.
Written in a sorcerous visual prose that invokes Cobain’s lyrics and the album and video art of In Utero-period Nirvana (both of which were all but entirely of Cobain provenance), Lynn Crosbie’s new novel, Where Did You Sleep Last Night, takes that teenaged instinct to ingest the artist that’s making you into you all the way to the poster-wrapped wall. An attempted suicide lands grunge witchling Evelyn in a coma, where through sheer force of fantasy she manifests Kurt back into being in the form of the overdosed boy in the next bed. The pages that describe their fusion of minds, a kind of magic enabled by the twinned nature of their maladies and an unethical nurse who opiates them into a heaven straight out of Nirvana’s “Dumb,” is simultaneously the most surreal depiction of falling in love I’ve ever read and the truest. The bloodiest of lovers know that the kind of romance that from two people lunges itself whole into the world is a third being, a protean hybrid of place and self which inflicts its own will onto the hearts of its makers. In locating the birth of Evelyn and Kurt’s (renamed Celine Black by Evelyn herself, finalizing her creation) love in a liminal space created out of their paired subconscious, Crosbie brilliantly literalizes the wild world-building that happens when creative people fall deeply in love.
Where Did You Sleep Last Night is love story as ejaculatory teenaged fever-dream, warping realism into something closer to what its bright-burning protagonists could recognize as reality. From the hospital, to the psych ward, to the scarred stages of punk-rock legend, Evelyn and Celine reenact the feedback-pitched drama of Kurt and Courtney like a kind of tragic ritual, hurtling through tours, overdoses, rehabs and meltdowns, only to retreat again and again into the creative/destructive womb of their rotten love. According to interviews, Crosbie, inspired by Cobain fan fiction she’d read online, initially conceived of the book as a young adult novel, only to have it bloom into this rough beast. It’s a blessing—the material is too rabid and joyful to be muzzled, and the teens that YA ostensibly serves deserve better—but the violent-hearted emotion remains, as do the plot absurdities, which, removed from their usual YA context, serve to heighten the sense that this story is taking place somewhere in the layer of reality that forms between the forehead of a fifteen-year-old in her bedroom blowing up her heart on music and the record sleeve propped against her knees.
It’s tough to criticize a novel that lands all its blows right where it aims them, and with such joyful style. So instead of a criticism, all I can offer is a complaint. From the age of about thirteen to maybe sixteen or seventeen, my sense of spiritual identification with Kurt Cobain—or at least the one I believed I knew through long, long small-town nights spent staring at the ceiling while his guitar and voice winged and staggered around my tiny basement room—was so intense that I honestly believe what I heard as his music may have significantly shaped the landscape of my relationship with the world, the same way hands will shape the handles of very old tools, or asses the couches that endure them.
The way I respond to the raw and authentic and powerfully felt over the poised and controlled, the way I, deep-down, still assume that to create something honest—even if only for a moment, live, that will pass and be gone—will offer redemption of a kind that cannot be negated, not even by pain so hideously alive that a shotgun becomes mercy. The way I always trust the troubled more than the untroubled, the way I’d rather forgive than merely admire… Maybe Kurt didn’t teach me these things, but somehow nightly bathing myself in those sounds at that humming, sensitive age was like placing myself in a furnace that glazed them onto my bones. I’m saying this only because Where Did You Sleep Last Night isn’t for the thirty-four-year-old me, who wants to know how and why that is, and how it works, what it means for me now. It’s for the fifteen-year-old with the record who just wants to be there with him in that world between head and sleeve, because it’s the truest place they know. In taking us there, Lynn Crosbie has conducted a kind of ritual that feels somehow essential for anyone who stepped through the door from childhood to youth by putting on a record. It’s a great book, and possibly something even rarer in CanLit—a book that does something new.
Anansi | 256 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1770899315