Laing is a British novelist and cultural critic who writes for the Guardian, the New York Times, The Observer,  Frieze and other periodicals.  She has written five books of non-fiction.  I’ve read two of them, “The Lonely City” and “The Garden Against Time”, and found them both thought-provoking and fascinating.

“The Lonely City” explores the alienation and loneliness that are endemic in our society.  Laing observed that loneliness, “an overwhelming, unmeetable need for attention and affection, to be heard and touched and seen“ can be addressed by art, “preparing oneself for the dangerous lovely business’ of intimacy” through “some odd negotiating ability between people, including people who never meet and yet who infiltrate and enrich each other’s lives.  It does have the capacity to create intimacy; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly.”  Her final conclusion is that the cure for loneliness does not depend on meeting someone but is about two things:  “learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted.”  This is a very important and thought-provoking book!

I also found her latest book, “The Garden Against Time” to be a wonderful and wandering examination of the beauty of gardening.  In his NYT review, A.O. Scott wrote: “She belongs in an as-yet-undefined and perhaps undefinable class of prose artists who blend feeling and analysis, speculation and research, wit and instruction as they track down the elusive patterns and inescapable contradictions of modern experience. If I were in an algorithmic mood, I’d mention Geoff Dyer, Teju Cole, Jenny Diski (who was married to Ian Patterson until her death in 2016) and W.G. Sebald.  Since Dyer and Sebald are two of my favorite writers, it’s clear that Scott, like me, loved this book and you may as well.

So, I opened this book which was written in 2020 with great anticipation, and I wasn’t disappointed.  There are eight sections, comprising brief columns from various publications as well as more lengthy biographical essays about artists, book reviews, and obituaries she wrote about poets, artists, and writers.

I loved the artist bios, a much better form for me to learn about Agnes Martin’s paranoid schizophrenia and the particulars of Basquiat, Hockney, Cornell, Rauschenberg, O’Keeffe, Jarman, and Wojnarowicz than the 1000 page doorstop bios that have become the norm today. I especially found the piece on Wojnarowicz, whose visage graces the cover of the book, to be informative and moving.  The Frieze columns on the other hand felt a bit too British-parochial and suffered from the world having moved on well past the trump-inflicted disasters of his first term.  I loved her bios of “Four Women” and her book reviews especially of the work of Maggie Nelson (“The Argonauts”), Jenni Quilter (“New York School: Painters and Poets”) and Sally Rooney (“Normal People”) all of which I hope to read in the coming weeks.

Laing is queer and goes by the pronoun, “they” which sadly and to my own detriment, along with her very Anglo-focused criticism, I found a bit difficult to understand at times (e.g. her conversation with Joseph Keckler), but overall, this book is another gem. She is, undoubtedly, a presence that will fill pages and books with her incisive and crystal-clear take on books, films, music and society for years to come.  Read her!