Customer Reviews

Lady Lazarus

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A kind friend gave me a copy of this book when it was still in its white, ARC covers. the same design as the resulting green edition, but noticeably more sepulchral. I had met the author through the offices of Lynne Tillman, who recommended him as one of the outstanding voices of tomorrow. His book is massive and must have taken years to write, though the initial conception must have come like a stroke of lightning: weren't Sylvia and Ted, like, the first punks? The way they kissed when they first met, biting each other at the party--wasn't that a bit like the legendary love affair between Kurt and Courtney? What if they were actually all the same people, and they had a daughter too, so that the daughter could go through the same torment of father loving and hating that Sylvia felt for Otto, the beekeeper who put Electra on Azalea Path, and put it in the rock world, and the world of postmodern media ? Then you would have a recipe for something truly radical and daring.

Then on top of it, Foster Altchul invents a toadying, prosy sort of biographer narrator who's even more of a sad sack then the one in Nabokov's PALE FIRE, and gives him his own name to muddy the simple waters that used to divide reader, writer, narrator, and audience.

Calliope, the heroine of the story, saw her dad commit suicide when she was just a child, and out of this trauma she becomes a poet with a huge worldwide audience who sympathize with her "live through this" attitude and her eventual reinvention of herself as a "death artist." She becomes the host of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE and Maya Angelou records her poems, so she has this cross-cultural appeal that, I wonder, isn't made even more humorously unbelievable by the examples of her poetry that the biographer keeps quoting like they were genius. There's a whole academic industry in Calliope Studies in the citing of which, joyfully, Foster Altchul gets to parody a huge range of critical styles, from Sandra Gilbert to Marjorie Perloff. His enthusiasm for his own invention is infectious, and enlivens the dense novel no end, just like Thomas Pynchon's comic setpieces of horrid English food propelled the murkier Nietscheanisms of GRAVITY'S RAINBOW.

In fact, I expect that people of the future will return to LADY LAZARUS long after the names of Ted, Sylvia, Kurt, Courtney, and even Marjorie Perloff are long forgotten. No single episode of his imagination is as amazing, droll, or even effective as Foster Altshul thinks that it is, but the whole is far greater than its parts. He is like the alchemist of broken toys and making them into this big Joseph Cornell box, that has "cult classic" written all over it.

If the great author F. Scott Fitzgerald was right when he said that the test of first-rate intelligence is "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function," then author Andrew Altschul is scary-smart. In his debut novel, Lady Lazarus [Harcourt], Altschul plays with plenty of ideas at once, including Zen Buddhism, the high-minded literary theories of Lacan and Derrida, psychoanalysis, romantic and familial love, and the idea of structure itself, all juxtaposed against a backdrop of poetry and alternative rock.

Lady Lazarus is the purposefully thin-guised of the story of the Cobain's, lavishly interwoven with poetic and personal details of the great poet Sylvia Plath's life. Think of the premise as this: Alt-grunge superstar Brandt Morath (Kurt Cobain) and his psycho-bitch, punk-rock wife Penelope "Penny" Power (Courtney Love), have a baby girl they call Calliope Bird (Francis Bean). Brandt commits suicide, Penny goes Hollywood between tantrums and drug binges, and Bird grows up to become, as Altschul said in his recent reading at St. Louis' Left Bank Books, "the World's most famous poet, which is not to be confused with the World's greatest poet."

Initially, at least for Plath-freaks who also know a little something about Nirvana (and doesn't everyone know a little something about Nirvana?) Lady Lazarus feels a bit like a game: Oh! Electra on Azalea Path! The Earthenware Head! Courtship with a bite on the cheek! The Double Self! The Beekeeper!

Ah, but that's just Altschul setting the mood. Fifty pages in, you're entertained. A hundred pages in, you're hooked, if not yet on the story itself, then on the gorgeous prose, the snarky voices, and the subtle commentaries on higher education, public relations and the power of Saturday Night Live, publishing and cover bands. It just gets deeper from there; layers and layers of meaning, each like a different color silkscreened onto this canvas of the whole 555-page, postmodern structure. And if all that wasn't enough, it's metafiction too: he's inserted the story of an obsessed biographer into the mix, coincidentally named Andrew Altschul, who misses the point, is not as cool as he'd like to be, and endearingly blunders his way toward what is Real, what he feels, and what he knew all along--if anything, in fact, is real. Sort of a Wizard of Oz for the spirit.

If you want to know the fabula (a word Altschul taught me--the framework of events), read Sylvia Plath's famous poem, "Lady Lazarus." But if you want the beauty of the greater meanings, and how these meanings weave together and complement each other; if you want something to sit with and think about for days; if you want something great enough to warrant -no, to demand- a revisit, read this book.

[As reviewed on nighttimes]

You start to read not knowing what you'll get. You find rock `n' roll content. Unexpectedly, you discover a mystery with over-the-top satire. That's even more appealing, you think to yourself. You're bewildered by scenes you'd never anticipated but you keep reading because you`ve become so engrossed. Do you find the narrative far-fetched? Most assuredly. But you proceed with stunned fascination, not believing that you've gotten as far into the book as you have. Most shocking is that you can't stop because you love every word of its outrageous subject matter. Is it enigmatic, almost unfathomable? Yes, but there's no way to get around the fact that you're totally entertained. Eventually, you may even forget why you'd started to read this book in the first place (as if you really needed a reason!).

However you look at it, you're guaranteed to remember the adventures of Calliope Bird Morath. She's the heroine of this debut novel by Andrew Foster Altschul. If you have an open mind and are willing to suspend disbelief more than once, you'll find ample reward at the end of every scene. You'll also come across poetry, hero worship, the supernatural and magical realism. Indeed, Altschul's imaginative writing goes out on the proverbial limb. After all, there's something to be said for a writer fearless enough to challenge readers with his work. I, for one, feel greatly recompensed for my time spent reading Lady Lazarus.

This book was a first novel, a fictional biography of the daughter of punk rock royalty. Her father committed suicide when she was four, and her mother carried on to both raise her and preserve his memory, while still dealing with the release of box sets and whatnot for the band. Sound kind of like the setup and post-Nirvana story in our real world? Sort of. Said daughter (Calliope Bird Morath) then ends up being a prodigy poet, with a concern with bees, in a Sylvia Plath-like manner. I enjoyed the intelligence of it, and the story itself. The author did a very good job of establishing this fictional history and legend in our real-world context, footnoting citations, referencing interviews and other biographical works, and in fact getting personally invested in the story. My only complaint is that the prose gets occasionally too ponderous, as the author waxes egotistical intellectual while trying to unravel the "Real Story" in the context of his subject, but even that worked, as a literary device. I got the book solely on the merit of its title, and I wasn't disappointed.

I like the writing devices- the transcript chapter, the footnotes, the poetry inserts. I'm just not interested in the book.

The music & culture of the '80s underground have been getting analyzed in documentary films for the past few years, but I think it is five years too early to reminisce about the '90s.

Maybe "Lady Lazarus: The Motion Picture" will catch that wave and ride it.