Literature editor ROMILLY SCHULTE reviews Kevin Killian’s Selected Amazon Reviews, tracking the “Top 100” reviewer’s ingenious subversion of style, form, and criticism.
Kevin Killian’s Selected Amazon Reviews is a conclusion of a text. An expansive and all-seeing work, Reviews ties up the ends of New Narrative into a big, fat, twenty-first century knot. 80s San Francisco and all of her autobiographical gossipiness bolted into a technological age of mass consumption and LCD computer screens.
A beloved figurehead of the San Francisco New Narrative scene, Killian produced works of poetry, drama and prose, spanning tales from his youth as an insolent enfant terrible of the seventies up to his personal reflections on the AIDS epidemic (Impossible Princess, Argento Series). New Narrative texts are unafraid of sex and Blood and Guts, and Killian’s predominantly autobiographical oeuvre is certainly stripped of prim-and-proper squeamishness.
Yet, it was his final decade in which he produced his most vast, albeit unconventional, body of work: the Amazon Reviews. A project-slash-compulsion lasting over thirteen years, Killian’s reviewing practice began following a heart attack in 2003. Intense medication alongside physical and emotional trauma left his writing mind in precarious condition. His widow and fellow writer, Dodie Bellamy, recounts his being “too fucked up to write.” In 2006, Killian emailed poet James Wagner, stating that”‘the drugs had removed his mind,” feeling as if he were under a “mescaline high” that left him with no compulsion to write.
Write, however, he did. His “assiduous” project of writing Amazon reviews began with posts a handful of lines long, commenting on whatever film or book he had been consuming that day. These eventually developed into reviews that stretch a page or two. No product, film or book is left unmentioned; Killian’s all-consuming-eye damns pretension or snobbishness. By the end of his life, he had produced over one million words of cultural criticism. Doing away with the stodgy restraints of academic critical tradition, Killian’s Amazon Reviews are a shameless adoration of culture high and low.
Amazon summons an image of all that is reprehensible in Western neoliberal ultra-technological society: mass consumption, the sweatshop, the Bezos-ian billionaire mogul—arguably an odd choice of medium for a great writer. Killian himself recognized the strange irony in creating “in the service of a huge multi-national corporation that was killing bookstores and perhaps writing itself.” We can view his work as a kind of squat in the metaverse. Charming witticism and extravagant flourishes of cultural reference and anecdote stand, armed and determined, against the uninhabited factory. He transforms the act of consumption into one of inexhaustible creation. The purchase of a bundle of yarn inspires deep lyrical reflection and ignites a yearning for a picturesque vision of a pre-industrial utopia: “It reminds you of a day at the farm, the perfect, Platonic farm that does not probably exist on earth but you can now create with your crochet hook”. Amidst the coldness of poorly translated Amazon product titles, the yarn’s name, “Moda-Dea” is heard as “the first fumbling words of a baby” as it tries to pronounce ‘“Mother Dear.” Yarn and the spinning wheel from whence it was produced become mother and child. Our relationship to the purchased product becomes one undercut by a feeling of the maternal. Killian transforms these throw-away, mass-produced miscellaenea, no longer seen through the blue-tinged LCD screen but through that lovely, pinkish hue of sentimentality and memory.
Little glimpses of the human soul peek through the soulless vastness of the Amazon site via gossiping anecdotes and stylish imaginings. I like to imagine trawling through an assortment of 12-pack coat hanger bundles and running into a Killian review, the unmanned plains of monochrome E-commerce graffitied with his technicolor words, lavished with exclamation and eye-winking digression. In a review of a pet training manual he can’t resist indulging in the Jennifer Lopez and Mariah Carey feud; in discussing Masha Tupitsyn’s collection of stories he laughingly shames the misspelling of celebrity names, notably the omission of the second n in Liza Minnelli. The camp and personal life is scrawled over the anonymity of public e-space.
And he really does cover it all. His reviews map out a mammoth array of art and culture with the ease and intimacy of a dear friend. Our image of the author is not that of the bespectacled professor perched in a leather-bound library, but that of the bejeweled master of cultural bazaar, his knowledge of works and people and ideas forming an intricate maze full of contrast and rabbit-holes and jouissance. He critiques a new edition of Plath’s Ariel with the same chatty attention which he directs at the biography of Paris Hilton’s pet chihuahua. The labored restraints of literary or academic review are flung into the returns pile.
This liberated approach to both form and content is San Francisco New Narrative to its core. Rather than figured as a literary “school”, with all the associated guidelines and restriction, “founders” Robert Glück and Bruce Boone termed it more so as a circle of writers, feeling as if they had to attach some kind of name to the work they were doing in order to distinguish it from the “[antagonistic]” language poetry being created at the time. The circle ranged from small-press writers, now commemorated in Bellamy and Killian’s New Narrative anthology Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing 1977-1997, to critically appraised and widely read writers like Kathy Acker and Dennis Cooper. A “movement” without doctrine or manifesto (despite the name’s apparent similarity to the nouveau roman school it has neither association with it nor a rulebook à la Alain Robert-Grillet’s deeply theoretical Pour un Nouveau Roman), it’s writings present a joy for the vernacular, and a uniting of pop culture and high art. New Narrative queers literature, liberating writing from censorship and prudishness.
Each of Killian’s Reviews touch back on this writerly freedom. He praises imagist poet Amy Lowell’s openness to writing about sex, which “old Ez[ra Pound] shied away from”. Independently published writers forgotten by time and neglected from a wider readership are discussed in the same charismatic flourish as those firmly rooted in academia and its canons, if not with a little preference. Cultural criticism is treated not as a canon-forming act that upholds some and obscures the few; Killian’s reflections illuminate all.
I would not regard this anthology as a well-read wink towards fellow literati armed with the same arsenal of cultural reference as Killian. Even for an every-man readership who may care little about his subversion of critical practice or the enormity of his Amazon opus or the radicality of typing down your existence onto the cold corpse of e-commerce; his reviews are fun. They entertain. Dazzling wit laughs out of each mark of punctuation. Bring Killian and his thoughts along on the bus; read a page or three on your cigarette break. I find myself scribbling down notes and titles and people to read into later. Treat the Reviews like a mammoth reading list with no deadline.
Although, despite all we can learn from Killian’s beloved books and films and miscellanea, Kevin and his San Francisco lack-of-sensibilities remain protagonist. His intimate tell-all voice guides though the hazy dark back-rooms of consumerism. In the nuclear winter that is Bezosian capitalism and all of its overconsumption, Killian shows culture lying beneath, surviving, if not thriving, on the scraps, reproducing and expanding against all odds.
Selected Amazon Reviews is set to be released through Semiotext(e) on November 19th, 2024. Featured image courtesy of Amazon.com.
