Kicking - Softcover

Dick, Leslie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0872862828 ISBN 13: 9780872862821

Publisher: City Lights Publishers, 2001

Synopsis

Set in the London and New York underground culture's of the '70s and '80s, Kicking tracks the adventures of a group of close friends through the ambiguous pleasures and dangers of those years. Connie West's attachment to Mikey Stour begins one Sunday afternoon in 1969 on an expedition to the romantic wilderness of Highgate cemetery. Their relationship over the next twenty years is a convoluted one, intersected by the lives of friends and lovers, among them Iris, whose eccentric path is to have a strange impact on their own. Connie discovers that the emotional imprint of one's past never dies but lies buried under the surface until, alive and kicking, sometimes as comic epiphany.

Here is a witty and psychologically acute portrayal of a vibrant world of artists and writers, of drug addiction and the impulse toward self-destruction, of all the ferocious loves and betrayals that change people forever.

Leslie Dick is the author of Without Falling (City Lights), a novel. She divides her time between London and Los Angeles, where she teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

Dick's second novel (after Without Falling, 1988--not reviewed) begins with a clever nouvelle roman flourish but soon finds its own level as a pretentious, stilted melodrama set in the so-called art worlds of London and New York in the Eighties. Told from the perspective of a neurasthenic young art critic named Connie, this self-consciously cinematic narrative concerns an on-again, off-again love triangle that can't sustain the weight of such belabored analysis. The opening scene, in which Connie witnesses a suicide, provides an interesting exercise in context and perspective but finally has little to do with the main story. Jumping back and forth through time, Connie meditates on her friendship with artists Michael and Ruby, her friends since they were all so young, and pretty and brilliant, according to Connie. What they say and do and create, however, suggests a trio of sexually promiscuous, politically shallow, and artistically lame characters more concerned with acting like artists than producing anything of real value. Brooding Michael is given to excess (he takes lots of heroin) and says things like ``God, it's all so fucking bourgeois.'' Ruby, a fellow Brit, also walks on the wild side and espouses revolutionary chic ideology. Connie, herself ``succumbed to ennui,'' romances death but doesn't take as many drugs--she reads Sylvia Plath instead. Half-American, she too has everything paid for by Mummy and Daddy. Her experience of art is hardly hypercritical (``She was knocked out by the Warhol''), and her reflections on her relationships are surprisingly girlish. An extended episode about a $500 debt suggests that Connie might be even crazier than she or her creator realizes. Imagine Tama Janowitz's ``art scene'' without even an attempt at humor, and you begin to get the silly solemnity of this self- mythologizing novel whose main characters are an annoying, whiny bunch of poseurs. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

Dick ( Without Falling ) squanders her sharp and intelligent style on a self-absorbed protagonist, whose recollections of her youthful relationships with a small group of people form the framework of this novel. Connie, a wealthy American who lives in London, witnesses a suicide, which abruptly triggers reminiscences about the band of bohemians with whom she once lived in a house in the English countryside. She thinks particularly about Michael, an artist and ex-junkie, and about her then-best friend, Ruby. Connie then reaches even farther back to her memories of high school when she originally met the pair, and of her own insecurity and cocaine abuse. Dick manages to shove in a lot of meaningless details about the '70s and '80s, like Michael's imitating the Clash's Joe Strummer by wearing a Red Brigades T-shirt. On the other hand, personal details often reverberate, as when Connie is shocked to learn Michael has quit smoking because she has such strong memories of the many ways he used to hold a cigarette. "Juvenilia . . . I can't imagine liking that work now," Michael says disparagingly about a mobile he had once made for Connie.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: City Lights Publishers
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0872862828
• ISBN 13: 9780872862821
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 243