This is a stunning novel which is Woolfian in its dazzling delight in prose, temporal play, narrative experimentation and powerful feeling.

Olivia Laing created a character who we think is Kathy Acker (the real Kathy Acker died in 1997). Kathy Acker is getting married, having just turned forty, and takes the reader on a wild ride on the state of her life and the world in the summer of 2017. Kathy tells us rapidly as if there isn't enough time, about her angst at committing to an older man and the horrible times we have lived through in the last year. Kathy knows all the famous people, moving in those circles. She and a friend discuss their concern about Sinead O'Connor as if they were close friends.

Kathy seems to be a lecturer in the USA but is planning to live with her husband in the UK. The novel begins with the couple on vacation, and then Kathy is continuously moving or planning to move to a different location to sell an apartment, rent an apartment, go to dinner, plan a wedding, buy a house, plant a garden. It is all about life abundant in material things with a clear notion that Trump, Brexit, and all the other horrors we are living will take us down, all of us.

I received an advanced copy of this novel from the publisher through NetGalley.

Overall, I thought that this book was thought provoking and brought up some important contemporary issues. However, the writing style kept me removed from the text. It is a stream of consciousness style, and I know some people will enjoy it quite a bit.

The form of this novel feels so fresh and I wanted to grab hold of it with both hands. But, ultimately, the style really got in the way of the story for me and I found it difficult to find a flow to reading this one. The form got in the way of substance for me.

I reviewed this title on Goodreads:

A comparison with Ali Smith's seasonal quartet is inevitable but also entirely apt. Smith is thanked in Laing's acknowledgments and, although Laing is clearly trying out a different kind of form, in its attempt to respond immediately to the chaos of the past few years, Crudo is very much of a piece with Autumn and Winter.

Smith's books, however, are defiant in the face of this chaos; Crudo feels anxious but ultimately submissive. Smith's books build layers of meaning as a kind of intellectual fortress against the shallowness and venality of the present; Crudo is deliberately cursory as it races across that same shallowness, matching it pace for pace and glide for glide. Smith tries to overcome the contemporary; Crudo tries to mimic it. Crudo is ultimately more about the artist than it is about the time in which we live; its contemporaneity comes from the artist's immersion in the present rather than the author's attempt to grapple with the paradoxes and double binds which are entrapping us.

Interesting contemporary fiction. More stream of conscious than I generally like but this was very readable and thought provoking.

Enjoyable piece - I couldn't quite make up my mind whether it seemed derivative of, or a fitting tribute to, the works of such as Chris Kraus, Maggie Nelson, Ali Smith and Virginia Woolf. As it's written in stream of consciousness, it's a very quick read and compelling. However overall I prefer Laing's non-fiction, and as this seems to be mostly non-fiction anyway I question why it was published as a novel.