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Loading... Generation Loss (original 2007; edition 2008)by Elizabeth Hand
Work detailsGeneration Loss by Elizabeth Hand (2007)
 BMorrisAllen | Mar 31, 2013 |  Generation Loss is impossible to put down, in the same way that it's impossible to refrain from poking a beached dead seal with a stick: repellent but compelling. Hand combines a bunch of unlikely elements - an aging meth head, a famous photographer, a serial killer, an artists' commune, a sullen teenager, and the lonely, tangled wilds of the Maine coast - into a lean and perfect tale about endurance and redemption. A beautiful and unsettling book. (  ) paperloverevolution | Mar 30, 2013 | I'm really not sure how I felt about this book. It had spectacular atmosphere, and Cass grew on me throughout the book, but she's just not a likeable person. I will probably read the sequel, so does that mean I liked it? (  ) jen.e.moore | Mar 30, 2013 | The synopsis suggests Cass is trying for redemption, but that doesn't seem to be on Cass's mind. Lurid curiosity, desperation and maybe even a tiny bit of pride. Those are the things that propel Cass out of her pit of self-loathing and inanition. Besides her still-born career as a photographer, that's the first loss we see in this story, where Cass loses her fear to act and takes on this strange assignment. Other losses soon follow, some literal, some situational and some just ingrained into life itself. The title is a very apt one. Despite nothing much happening until quite near the end and Cass's innate unlikability I was mesmerized by her story. Cass is unthinkingly amoral. A snoop, a thief, a manipulator, an addict. None of those things is particularly attractive, but I liked her voice, her story and her honesty. At once Cass battles her way through life and also slips through it silently. She can be terribly self-effacing or in-your-face depending on what will serve her ends more effectively. She is not a whiner though. Too tough to die is her motto and she has it tattooed near some of the many scars that encircle her body. Through many an internal monologue, Cass explains her past and her failure as a photographer, but she doesn't assign blame to anyone except herself. She blew it. She knows it. Her work has value to her and she is genuinely baffled at why no one else values it. Death in all its forms is beautiful to Cass and that's ultimately why she is in awe of Denny's criminally artistic photographs. She knows her ugly side is her best side and she's living with it as best she can. Another loss to bear is one of disillusion. Part of the reason Cass takes this assignment is to be near a photographer she admired. One whose work influenced her own. Aphrodite Kamestos. Oh sure, she's got the books and has seen reproductions, but to view the original prints, up close - that would be mind-blowing. Because part of what makes an avant-garde photograph is its very physicality. Not just the paper, but the emulsion and all that might be embedded, scratched or burned into it. The smell, the texture..all of it is important to Cass and her ideas of what is authentic. When she finds that some of the photos she has held in her mind's eye have been gone from this earth for decades and that finally the photographer herself has given up in a sense of futility and inadequacy, Cass is disappointed beyond her ability to describe. When she eventually confronts exactly what and why Aphrodite stopped taking pictures she understands perfectly and lets go of her heroine willingly; almost ashamed to have admired her so much. Denny knew though. Denny could see. Just why he waited so long to show Cass isn't exactly clear and I'd have liked a more thoughtful ending than the rush of action and insanity we were given. Overall though I liked it well enough to go on to the follow-up featuring Cass Neary. Neither of us knows what she's looking for, but I think she will when she finds it. (  ) Bookmarque | Nov 12, 2012 | Gothic mystery. Depressing book, well written if you do not mind that most of the story happens in the last 1/5th of the book. ( ) veracruzlynn | Mar 13, 2012 | no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0156031345, Paperback)Praise for Elizabeth Hand's previous novels: "Inhabits a world between reason and insanity-it's a delightful waking dream."--People "One of the most sheerly impressive, not to mention overwhelmingly beautiful books I have read in a long time."--Peter Straub Cass Neary made her name in the 1970s as a photographer embedded in the burgeoning punk movement in New York City. Her pictures of the musicians and hangers on, the infamous, the damned, and the dead, got her into art galleries and a book deal. But 30 years later she is adrift, on her way down, and almost out. Then an old acquaintance sends her on a mercy gig to interview a famously reclusive photographer who lives on an island in Maine. When she arrives Downeast, Cass stumbles across a decades-old mystery that is still claiming victims, and into one final shot at redemption. Questions for Elizabeth Hand Jeff VanderMeer for Amazon.com: Your novel Generation Loss introduces readers to a very eccentric and sometimes selfish photographer named Cass. Are all artists inherently selfish? Hand: Yes. You can't be an artist without being inherently self-involved, without believing that the world owes you a living, and that everything you do--anything, matter how sick or twisted or feeble or pathetic--is worthy of attention. This is the secret behind the success of stuff like American Idol and YouTube. This is the world Andy Warhol bequeathed to us. Amazon.com: Isn't it partially that selfishness that results in great fiction? Isn't the antagonist of your novel in a way driven by selfishness? Hand: I don't think I'd call it selfishness, to be truthful. I think creating any real art depends on an intense amount of focus¬--of filtering out the rest of the world as much as you can, to sustain and then impart your own vision or secondary world--what John Gardner called "the vivid and continuous dream." I think the antagonist of Generation Loss sees himself as being impelled by love--romantic love, carnal love, the pure love of artistic creation--not selfishness. Whereas Cass's motivation is something far darker and more sinister than love. She's seen the abyss; she lives there. Amazon.com: Is Cass Neary a prototypical "bad girl"? Hand: Well, she's your prototypical amoral speedfreak crankhead kleptomaniac murderous rage-filled alcoholic bisexual heavily-tattooed American female photographer. So, yeah. Amazon.com: So this is definitely not what you'd call "chick lit"? Hand: Umm, probably not. If it were a movie, it would have a NC-17 rating. Or maybe NR. Is Lolita considered chick lit? That book had a huge influence on me, especially with this novel. I always wanted to create a narrator like Humbert Humbert, someone utterly reprehensible and unsympathetic who still manages to command a reader's attention and even an uneasy sympathy. I loved the idea of making a reader complicit with the crimes committed by a protagonist. The simple act of continuing to turn the pages makes you guilty by association. Amazon.com: Did you have a particular artist in mind as the inspiration for the foul-smelling but visionary paintings in the novel? Hand: No. That part I made up. Amazon.com: C'mon. You're not allowed to just make things up. Spill the beans. Hand: No, I really didn't have anyone in mind. There are elements of the work of photographers I admire--Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Sally Man, Joel-Peter Witkin--and of outsider artists like Henry Darger or Richard Dadd or Roky Erickson. But the whole concept of an artist creating his own emulsion paper--I thought of that, then researched it and learned that, indeed, some photographers work that way. I also consulted a photographic conservator who's an acquaintance and asked him, Is this possible? He said yes, and I took it from there. Amazon.com: Are people in Maine as mean toward tourists as you describe? Hand: No. Just me. Though folks who work at the general store three doors down from me really do sometimes wear a T-shirt that reads THEY CALL IT TOURIST SEASON, WHY CAN'T WE SHOOT THEM? So, okay, me and them. Amazon.com: Have you ever driven a tourist off your property with a shovel? Hand: Not yet. But I would. A few years ago friend said he pictured me up on the Laurentian shield, threatening outsiders with a pitchfork. That's pretty accurate. Amazon.com: Weren't you once a tourist? Hand: Never. I lived in DC for 13 years, and worked for a long time at the Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museum--Tourist Central. That effectively killed any sympathy I might ever have had towards them. Amazon.com: What's coming up for you? Hand: Well, I'll be doing some touring and readings for this book, and I hope to record the entire novel as a podcast/audio book--I'm very excited to be performing again. I'm presently at work on a YA novel about Arthur Rimbaud called Wonderwall, to be published by Viking, and am brooding on another novel that might be something along the lines of Generation Loss, or not. I get restless and like to shift gears a lot. So we'll see. (retrieved from Amazon Tue, 19 Apr 2011 03:56:59 -0400) "Cass Neary made her name in the '70s as a photographer embedded in the burgeoning punk movement in New York City. Her pictures of the musicians and the hangers-on, the infamous, the damned, and the dead, got her into art galleries and a book deal." "Thirty years later she is adrift, on her way down, and almost out when an old acquaintance sends her on a mercy gig to interview a famously reclusive photographer who lives on an island in Maine." "When she arrives Downeast, Cass stumbles across a decades-old mystery which is still claiming victims, and into one final shot at redemption."--BOOK JACKET.… (more) (summary from another edition) |
 Google Books — Loading...RatingAverage: (3.89)
 Audible.comAn edition of this book was published by Audible.com.
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Wikipedia in English (1)
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In Generation Loss, Cass Neary, a small-town girl turned big-city punk photographer has spent twenty years doing drugs, having sex, and having once been slightly famous. She heads to Maine to interview a more famous has-been photographer, and things go bad.
Cass is an amoral, unlikeable character. That can work fine, especially in third person. Hand, though, uses a first person perspective, and she doesn't pull it off. Cass goes around doing amoral things, but there's never any reflection or introspection that explains why. She clearly recognizes that, for example, stealing and hiding someone's car keys is not a good thing to do, but she does it anyway. Aside from plot convenience, we never learn why she does it or how she feels about it. It's just one of those things - she's outwardly a bad person. Again, that might work, except that we're seeing the action from her point of view, and she appears to have no opinion about it.
Hand seems to go out of her way to concoct a stereotype - gritty, dark, and pretentious all at once. Must the music be Patti Smith and John Coltrane? Despite her limited life of drugs and sex, Cass seems to have managed to learn a lot about not only photography, but furniture and wine. She walks into one room in a decrepit house on a Maine island, and we learn that it's full of "Twentieth Century Danish Modern furniture. Arne Jacobsen chairs, a cane and bamboo Jacobsen Slug chair, a beautifully spare Klint dining table." To be honest, I don't know or care what any of this is. But I find it hard to accept that a ne'er do well who's spent her life in crappy apartments can pick all this out at a glance. Hand seems to feel the need to drop names - especially in photography. This is more excusable, since the protagonist is a photographer. But in the space of four paragraphs, she mentions: Warhol, Schnabel, Koons, Curtins; Chris Mars, Joe Coleman; Lori Field, Nick Blinko; Fred Ressler, Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith, Lee Friedlander, Brian Belott, Branka Jukic. I don't know who most of these people are. I'm sure it's fun for photography and modern art aficionados, but to an average reader, it's overkill. I got the point way back - Cass knows photography.
Despite all this, and a plot that seems to cry out "Make me into a horror film, please!", there's no denying Hand's stylistic skill. Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, Generation Loss is well written. It was more than enough to get me to finish the book with some enjoyment. It's not enough to get me interested in the sequel, out next year. In fact, much as I admire her writing, and much as I approve of doing new things, I'm not sure I'm in Hand's audience any more.
In brief - if you're looking for a return to Hand's early work, look elsewhere. If you want gritty, dark, well written horror, this is the book for you, especially if you're excited about photography. (