Hell, best known for his outstanding work during the seventies with the Voidoids and Television, has carefully crafted his second novel Godlike, published last year on Akashic Books under Dennis Cooper`s Little House on the Bowery series. The novelette is structured as the notebooks/novel of a hospitalized writer reflecting back on his Lower East Side love affair twenty years prior with a rather off-putting teenage poet. The plot and characters are based loosely on the late 1800s poets love affair between Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud set in the grime of early 1970s New York.
The form is ambitious, with the narrator jumping back and forth in time between third and first person narratives, and also interspersing his retellings with musings and poetry. While this style has managed to remain easily readable and coherent, and while Hell`s credibility as to the goings on of 1970s Lower East Side can´t quite be disputed, there remains a consistent uncomfortable feeling throughout the book that Hell is posturing as some preconception of a gritty writer.
The flow is tinged with creative-writing class adjective-based prose and supposedly shocking outbursts of vulgarity and cock-sucking which feel transparent and predictable, as if you can picture the moment the author completed each sentence and mistakenly smiled to himself at the profundity or intemperance of what he`d just written. The musings of the narrator are often even more guilty of this transparency, small and clear glimpses into Hell`s self-envisioned street-philosopher side. Despite some great sentences and concepts here and there the book tends to wobble around in its own attempted filthiness and sophomoric poetry without giving much reason for the reader to care about either the characters or what happens to them, a tactic which could be utilized to achieve some sort of end if the quality and freshness of the poems and ramblings where more in line with the level of thoughtfulness and ambition Hell clearly put into this book.
It is always a difficult achievement for an aging accomplished artist in one medium to switch to another and I applaud Hell`s efforts and vision even if they fall a bit short of something I´d recommend reading. For those interested in books about this type of grimy 1970s New York, look into reading David Wojnarowicz or another acclaimed author from the time rather than an overly stylized and nostalgic look back.
--Chris Kline
Richard Hell: Godlike Akashic Books, New York, NY - 2005.
