Blood and Guts in High School

Blood and Guts in High School is a surreal and brash book that is novel, poetry, play, translation, and more within a short space. It is the story of Janey Smith, who moves to New York, ends up trapped in a locked room, and writes down bits of her life. In some ways it is a punk coming of age story about imprisonment and sex; in other ways it is a referential book that moves between structures and features Jean Genet and President Carter.

The controversy surrounding the book when it was originally published in 1984 is easy to see through its explicit writing and drawings, its punk attitude, and its dreamlike movement through the streets of America and beyond. It is certainly an interesting read, though like writers like Burroughs, it can be easy to fall off a thread and lose track of everything, and some sections less engaging than others. The content is harsh and shocking and won’t be for everyone, but the rapid, witty, and often painful writing in Blood and Guts in High School is a look at America from the underside that doesn’t lose power all these years later.

Blood and Guts in High School
Kathy Acker
My Review: ♥ ♥
Kathy Acker led a colourful life. I read her Biography by Chris Kraus (After Kathy Acker) before Blood and Guts in High School. I can see how this book relates to her own experiences. Kathy's life wasn't all roses, and she liked to colour out of the box. This reflects in this book, and it also talks about aspects of her actual life, such as the health issues she suffered from.

Blood and Guts in High School is about a girl, Janey. She finds her life is not going as planned. She lost her mother at a young age and her father is less than perfect. Janey encounters some disturbing sexual experiences. She just wants to be loved, but life can be cruel.

This is not a happy-go-lucky kind of story. Kathy Acker was known in her time for her shock factor. I would say that her work still holds this quality today. Blood and Guts in high school has poems, dialogue and graphic x-rated pictures. Kathy was an interesting person with strong views. Some would call her books master pieces but I'm sorry I just wasn't that into this book. I enjoyed her Biography more.

*ARC received in exchange for a fair review*

Paperback £7.71 or Kindle £4.99. 165 pages
Published January 11th 1984 by Grove Press

Originally written in the 1970s, this Penguin re-release coincides with Acker's untimely death from cancer 20 years ago this year. Ever the enfant terrible, this is deliberately designed to provoke and shock - and that it still can in 2017 would, I think, have amused Acker vastly.

She throws everything into this dislocated narrative: sex, violence, disease, exploitation, corruption, abuse, incest, feminism, capitalism, anger, submission, identity, the grotesque body... with nods along the way to all those master-narratives that construct culture, from Freud and Marx to Hamlet and Sartre. At times deliberately disgusting, at others blackly funny (Janey's analysis of The Scarlet Letter is twisted genius!), this tears up the rule books of what 'fiction', 'narrative', a 'novel' are supposed to be, and creates what only barely passes for a story via a collage of prose, dialogue, verse, drawings, scrawled capitals, 'Persian' writing.

For all of the ways that this intersects with critical theory, the theorisation of women's writing (think Cixous' écriture féminine, Irigaray, Kristeva) and Lacanian psychoanalysis, it's also dirty and grubby and revelling in its own gleeful rebelliousness and subversive energy.

Certainly not for everyone...

So this is story about Janey, a ten-yea-old girl, half-orphan, living with her father who to her is "boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father" - and we might add sexual partner. First he rapes her, then she willingly has sex with him because it makes her feel loved. She is suffering from pelvic inflammatory disease, has her first abortion with 13, her second one a month later. Her father sends her to New York City, where apparrently she lives on her own, joins a gang and later is kidnapped, held captive and taught how to be a prostitute. At the age of 14 she gets cancer and dies.

Blood and Guts in High School clearly is a book not for everyone - including me. It is just the type of book I as a teenager would have called "problem book" and which I already hated back then. It now is a Penguin Modern Classic and I really don't see the reason why because usually the titles in this series are of a certain quality. The only reason I'm rating this book two stars instead of one is the writing technique Kathy Acker uses - collage. The story is told from Janey's perspective but alternates between first and third person narration. There are multiple drawings (especially ones of sexual organs), poems, letters etc. (for example the first scene of the book is written as a drama scene). This could have made a decent book but I had a problem with Janey's thoughts. At the end of the book she is 14 but hardly had any education. During her imprisonment she reads The Scarlet Letter, completely understands it and knows how to interpret it. This is quite unlikely as are many of her other thoughts - they are the thoughts of someone maybe 20 years old or older.

(I received a free digital copy via Netgalley/ the publisher. Thanks for the opportunity!)