Blood and Guts in High School: A Novel (Acker, Kathy) [Paperback]

Kathy Acker (Author)

Book Description

Series: Acker, Kathy | Publication Date: January 11, 1994

Jamey lived in the locked room. Twice a day the Persian slave trader came in and taught her to be a whore. Otherwise there was nothing. Once day she found a pencil stub and scrap of paper in a forgotten corner of the room. She began to write down her life, starting with "Parents stink" (Her father, who is also her boyfriend, has fallen in love with another woman and is about to leave her). With "Blood and Guts in High School, " Kathy Acker, whose work has been labeled everthing from post-punk porn to post-punk feminism, has created a brilliantly subversive narrative built from conversation, description, conjecture, and moments snatched from history and literature.

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; 1st Evergreen Ed edition (January 11, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080213193X
• ISBN-13: 978-0802131935
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 5.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #84,548 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars give it another chance!, December 10, 2001

By 

Big Girl's Mom (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blood and guts in high school (An Evergreen book) (Hardcover)

I disagree with a number of the previous reviewers. I think Acker uses her style effectively to drive a point home. She is rewriting the canon from a perspective of pain and oppression and her way of doing this is by attacking the very language that aids in her oppression. Janie must relearn language in her own way, hence we watch this process begin through drawings and a relaearning of the alphabet and finally a reconstruction and retelling of well known tales (e.g. The Scarlet Letter). Rather than being only dark and painful, I found the end to be somewhat uplifting by offering a glimmer of hope through the banding together of society's castoffs. It's a difficult book, but I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in seeing what happens when an author attempts to rewrite a personal history and in doing so urges us all to deconstruct our own narratives.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Acker's most accessible book, February 4, 2007

By 

hangnail (Las Angelos California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blood and Guts in High School: A Novel (Acker, Kathy) (Paperback)

The previous reviews have said that smart people like it and dumb people don't; I don't think that's true. Someone else said that it should be thrown on the floor because it's filth. I don't think that's true either.

I think that Acker had a gift for writing, but she let her obsession with sex and her need to shock get in the way of it. Several parts in this book shine with something that seems very real and honest - the part about getting an abortion ("I love it when men take care of me"); her detailed interpretation of The Scarlet Letter; the sections where she discusses the fact that women writers are plagiarists, because they can only use the words that men have written before them, for centuries.

But in between all of these flashes of brilliance is a lot of monotonous c-words and f-words and endless repetition of sexual humiliation. It's my opinion that if she had left most of that out, she could have been a great and major writer. Not because I'm morally opposed to the vulgarity, but because it's really boring after awhile. So it's ironic that the extreme vulgarity of her work is probably what made her famous - she attracted attention with shock value, but her work is ultimately, in my view, weakened by the shocking aspect of it.

I thought one quote of Janey's, where she's talking to Jean Genet, explains pretty well why Acker persisted in writing obscene scenes:
"I know where we're travelling, Genet, and I know why we're travelling there. It's not just to travel, but it's so those others who kicked me out have a chance of being at peace, having a chance of knowing the land of the monster without going there.
Genet: Do you think that's possible?"

I think Genet's question is the central one to ask of all of Acker's works. Does she succeed in taking the reader to a place of degradation and filthy, raw, animal-like sex scenes, as she intends to? And if she succeeds at that, does the reader really want to go there, to the land of the monster? I suppose my opinion of the book is biased because I only want to peek into the land of the monster, and then I wish Acker to move on and tell an engrossing story with her unique and honest observations instead.

Overall, I think this is her most accessible book because the sex is not as nonstop as it is in Great Expectations or some of her others. But to me, it's frustrating to read Blood and Guts in High School because of the passages that make it so clear that she was capable of writing a much better, concise, and more focused book.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Map of My Dreams-- by Janey, March 17, 2001

By 

frumiousb "frumiousb" (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Blood and Guts in High School: A Novel (Acker, Kathy) (Paperback)

Janey is a little girl wandering through a fantasy landscape of men who reject her-- her father, Jean Genet, the Persian Slave Trader, Tommy. This is a book communicating a world of pain-- the dialogues in the beginning between Janey and her father as he prepares to leave her for someone else carry the weight of the agony of someone being betrayed by someone so close and all the little lies and tricks we use to pull closer and push away. It's also a book about illness. Janey constantly has pain and infections and disease that cripple her, but she always pushes the physical pain to one side to focus on the men who she knows from the beginning are going to leave her.

It is not the easiest book in the world to read-- the emotion, rather than the plot, is the thread that ties the book together. There's a section in the book which is a series of drawings by Janey that provide a map to her dreams. I used this map to give the reading experience a kind of structure and I found that thinking about the book as a dream landscape made the lack of narrative much less jarring.