Generation Loss

Just finished a great new novel by Elizabeth Hand today, Generation Loss (due out in April from Small Beer Press, and from Harcourt later in paperback). The novel crackles with energy: it is alive. It springs at you like one of the creepy tree creatures that haunts the novel ("all rage and teeth"). On one level it's a murder mystery, but really it's about the beautiful and terrifying power of art. The narrator came of age during the 1970s punk scene in New York: she is scarred in ways that make her a terrifically complex character.

But most of all, it's the prose, the prose. At one point, the narrator describes what it was like to develop pictures in a dark room, seeing the images slowly come to life: "This is what I lived for. Me alone with these things. Not just knowing I'd seen them and taken the picture but feeling like I'd made them, like they'd never have existed without me. Nothing is like that: not sex, not drugs, not booze or sunrise off the most beautiful coast you can imagine. Nothing is like knowing you can make something like that real."

Later, this description of an earlier form of photography: "But then you tilt a daguerrotype just right, and the shadows and light fall into place, and what you're looking at becomes a 3-D image. It's an effect impossible to reproduce in a book or print, or even with computer imaging technology: the purest example of generation loss I can think of."

And what was punk, but a lost generation, so articulate that it has made itself myth? Patti Smith lurks in the pages of this book. Her 1975 album Horses, what to do with such a thing? Made at a moment when anything was possible, because everything was disintegrating. This novel captures the brilliance and sadness of knowing that what you create, what you make, will come to and. And so will you.

And yet...near the end of the novel the narrator and an alienated teenage girl talk about music. There is a generation gap (loss?), but there is also a bridging of that gap, as the girl and the narrator exchange gifts, so to speak.

It is this thrill of exchange, finally, that the novel is about. The electric transference of one idea.The generation loss that happens during transference. The static. The missed signals, and the secret ones.

The secret ones, most of all.