Customer Reviews

Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces, 1990-2005

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KILL ALL YOUR DARLINGS is a collection of Luc Sante pieces originally published, although many in somewhat different form, in journals or newspapers (such as The New York Review of Books or The Village Voice) between 1990 and 2005. (If you are wondering about the title, Sante provides no explanation or clues other than noting that "Kill all your darlings" was "writerly advice attributed to William Faulkner.") The individual pieces, 25 in all, deal with New York City and its environs or with significant (and, in several cases, not-so-significant) figures or events in American music, literature and belles-lettres, the visual arts, or pop culture broadly construed.

Inasmuch as I had read and valued highly two of Sante's previous books ("Low Life" and "The Factory of Facts"), I bought this book with high expectations simply because it was by Luc Sante. But reading 25 disparate pieces, with no real unifying threads or themes, was not quite as smooth sailing as I had anticipated. I could only read two or three at a time, over several weeks. And, unfortunately, the least interesting pieces (at least to me) were the ones on New York City at the beginning of the book. But the intrinsic interest picked up after the first 110 pages, with the high points, to my mind, being the pieces on Bob Dylan, Buddy Bolden, the origin/invention of the blues, Hegre and the Tintin books, Walker Evans, two of Michael Lesy's books of American photographs, and Robert Mapplethorpe.

Sante is a keen observer and often insightful commentator regarding popular and "middlebrow" culture as well as the underbelly and detritus of American life. He writes well and with a distinctive voice. (An example: "All kinds of thoroughly debunked specimens -- the noble cowboy, the contented housewife, the edenic small-town past -- continue to stagger along in the collective imagination because of their proven effectiveness as topical analgesics for reality-based headaches.") This collection illustrates that almost any of his pieces are worth reading, although it will be the rare reader indeed who truly is interested in everything that Sante writes about. All the same, these pieces probably are best read as they were published -- one at a time.

Finally, kudos to the publisher for a sturdy yet reader-friendly binding and a very readable lay-out.

This is a wonderful book. Literally. That is, it is full of wonders. At his not infrequent best -- in his essays on jazz and the blues -- Luc Sante reminds this reader of Edmund Wilson. Like Wilson, Sante is dogged and forensic. Without showing off, he tells you things you didn't know and puts you gratefully in his debt. And at his most casual (for instance, his piece on Rudolph Giuliani), Luc Sante is a joy to read.

"Kill all your Darlings" is a collection of essays by Luc Sante, a writer with a breathtaking command of the English language. This may have something to do with his learning English as a second language as a child (he was born in Liege, Belgium in 1954 and his family moved to the U.S. in the early 1960s) -- one thinks of Nabokov, another writer for whom English was not the first language, but who achieved a mastery of the language superior to that of most native speakers. At any rate, Sante writes so fluidly, with such grace (but without showing off), that the reader is happy to buy whatever story he's spinning.

The essays in this collection include pieces on art, photography, poetry and music, and some more idiosyncratic meditations -- on cigarettes, on factory work, on 'hipness', on the harm done to New York City by Rudy Giuliani, on the particular madness that characterizes New Year celebrations. Sante's Belgian origins are reflected in essays about Magritte and Tintin, respectively. Other pieces deal with Victor Hugo, the photography of Walker Evans and of Robert Mapplethorpe. There is a moving tribute to Allen Ginsberg, who lived in the same NY apartment building as Sante for over ten years.

Though I had no great prior interest in the musical evolution of Bob Dylan or the origin of the blues, Sante's writing is so seductive that I read both pieces, and was riveted throughout. He's just that good. This is an awe-inspiring collection.

My favorite essay was hands-down the one about cigarettes. Though Tintin was pretty fun as well.