Funny Weather

February 15, 2020
A stellar collection of essays and reviews from the award-winning London-based writer. Laing, the winner of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction, is often described as a cultural critic, but insofar as the term suggests a sole focus on the arts, it belies the wider sweep of these pieces, most of them previously published. A graceful stylist and superb reporter, the author is a journalist in the spirit of Michael Dirda, who calls himself "an appreciator" rather than a critic, and Laing includes no negative reviews here. Nonetheless, there's plenty of first-rate arts criticism in her appreciations of painters like David Hockney and Jean-Michel Basquiat and novelists Patricia Highsmith and Sally Rooney along with musings on topics like gardening and a standout essay on the surrealistic horrors faced by an asylum-seeking refugee who spent 11 years "trapped in Britain's infinite detention system." Laing's aesthetic tastes lean toward idiosyncratic or transgressive work that involves links between art and disaster, whether a crisis imperils the human body or the body politic. Disease and death stalk her pages--Kathy Acker's breast cancer, Freddie Mercury's AIDS, Georgia O'Keeffe's agoraphobia, and Hilary Mantel's migraines--but she brings a fresh and humane eye even to ills exhaustively covered elsewhere, such as David Bowie's cocaine addiction. Afflicted with corneal edema, the painter Sargy Mann "took a hair dryer to the National Gallery, plugged it in and calmly dried his soggy, waterlogged eye in order to see the paintings." Laing sinks only briefly into lit-crit jargon in discussions of "reparative reading," and sometimes her enthusiasms run away with her. Were the 700 or so poems by Frank O'Hara truly "as original and lovely as anything of the century"? Still, the author's praise never appears less than genuine or unsupported by deep observation, and she consistently shows the talent James Wood ascribed to Mantel: She has "the maddeningly unteachable gift of being interesting." Vibrant commentary on art and society by a writer with a sharp eye for the offbeat.

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March 2, 2020
This timely collection from Laing (The Trip to Echo Spring) asks “Can art do anything, especially during periods of crisis?” She shows that, indeed, art can change things for the better, pinning her assertion on critic Eve Sedgwick’s concept of “reparative reading,” which encourages readers to use hope, creativity, and survival in their interpretations. Broken up into sections that include artist profiles, literary criticism, and personal essay, the book shows where art can fight back, as with painter David Wojnarowicz’s writing and photography documenting his former partner’s death from AIDS at a time of political inaction. Thanks to the short length of her essays, she’s able to cover a lot of ground, touching on, in addition to the AIDS crisis, climate change, gender, and in two especially biting selections, the plight of refugees in the U.K. and the Grenfell Tower fire in London. Laing soars in her writing on Maggie Nelson, whom she describes as creating an “exhilarating new language for considering both the messiness of life and the meanings of art.” As a collection that aims to exemplify “new ways of seeing” to break through a “spin cycle of terrified paranoia,” this will leave readers eager to reengage with art they know well, and explore art as yet new to them.

May 1, 2020

This collection of art, literary, and cultural criticism by essayist and novelist Laing (The Lonely City) explores difficult material. Many of the themes--loneliness, alcoholism, the frailties of the human body, gender relations, runaway technology--long predate the contested politics implied in the subtitle (Brexit, the Trump presidency). Laing asserts this is not a depressing book, however, and finds inspiration in the work of the (mostly contemporary UK and U.S.) visual artists and writers profiled, creators who propose new ways of seeing via art that responds to crisis with generosity and engagement, art that is reparative. Many of the bracing, unflinching essays examine the lives of artists working in extremis, such as terminal illness (Derek Jarman, Kathy Acker) or disability (Sargy Mann, a painter who lost his eyesight). Readers will value Laing's talent for writing with equal discernment about the very different media of painting and sculpture on the one hand and fiction on the other (e.g., Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O'Keeffe, Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith). She draws perceptive insights from the biographical details of the artists' lives, sketching them in incisive profiles. VERDICT An excellent introduction both to the work of a fine cultural critic and to the creative figures discussed. [See Prepub Alert, 11/11/19.]--Michael Dashkin, New York

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