Review: Year of the Monkey

Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A little more than three years ago, the Chicago Cubs won the World Series. That seemed like a kind of dream, a fulfillment of something my family – in particular my father – had imagined since (in his case) the early 1930s.

Three days later, my beloved cat – Tobi – was killed in an accident with the garage door.

Two days after that, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. And nothing since then has felt quite the same.

It’s hard to think of that strange succession of events as having actually happened, or as having happened in such a way, with them seeming somehow connected. I’ll joke sometimes that the price of the Cubs’ victory was both my personal loss and the nation’s great self-inflicted insult, but it’s less direct than that. Those days were probably more or less ordinary, excepting those three events and the anxiety we all felt as the election loomed, but looking back on them makes them seem darkly poetic – seem as if it’s only fiction that can capture them.

In Year of the Monkey, Patti Smith traces her own build-up to the harrowing Trump victory. She takes the whole year, not just a week, and she weaves in her own great losses: long-time musical collaborator Sandy Pearlman of Blue Oyster Cult, and her on-again, off-again great love, the playwright Sam Shepard.

This book – it’s not quite memoir and not quite fiction in something of the model of Sergio Pitol – opens with her arriving out West to see Pearlman, among others. She learns right away that he’s suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, though, one from which he will never recover. And Shepard is struggling with ALS, the rugged figure deteriorating before her.

She is immediately taken by the sign in front of the cheap motel where she’s landed, the Dream Inn. It’s evocative, and she photographs it. (The book is full of such photos, and this is the first.)

What follows is hard to describe both because it’s often self-referential and because it’s occasionally self-indulgent. She meets a couple of men, Ernest and Jesus, in a dingy diner who are taken by the work of Roberto Balano. Then there’s a strange episode with candy wrappers that wash up to the beach and seem to be connected to the disappearance of a handful of children – all returned unharmed within a day or two. As Smith reads noirish detective novels, the line between what’s happening and what she’s imagining, blurs.

The book is loosely broken down into a series of months, with Smith moving from place to place, seemingly without a fixed itinerary. We are occasionally reminded that Smith is a major rock star – she explores the possibility of a tour in Australia which would allow her to visit a mountain that she and Shepard had always dreamed of climbing together – but mostly she’s an anonymous figure in the landscape. Everyone in the grey landscape of the America she explores seems to be a kind of artist; they all listen to interesting and distinctive music or read esoteric Latin American fiction. Still, no one ever seems to recognize her even though she’s just the sort of artist who’d be a touchstone for that sub-culture.

In the end, she reaches the discouraging denouement of Trump’s election, the sense that, as she puts it, “Twenty-four percent of the population had elected the worst of ourselves to represent the other seventy-six percent.” The experience feels unreal in the same way the deaths of Pearlman and Shepard – and the long-ago deaths of her husband, parents, and so many others – feel unreal. She wants to deny it all, to deny the truth of where we have found ourselves. She wants to counter at least some of Trump’s peculiar capacity to distort the real, his power to make his untruths have a cultural power even for those of us who recognize them as untruths. But she can’t.

At least not entirely, that is. She’s a writer and a poet, after all, and this memoir emerges as a strange space negotiating the real, the feared, and the remembered.

In the end, there’s a bit of a let-down in the “it was all a Dream [Inn]” reveal we get at the end, and I remain frustrated at times by the many references to Brooklyn hipster touchstones. At the same time, I love the crescendo that she reaches in the closing pages.

When you listen to Smith live in concert, there are often long stretches of self-indulgence, of periods when she drifts outside the structure of song into spoken-word or too out-there instrumentals. But if you stick with it all, there comes an end. There comes a great build-up of intellect and emotion. And, if you do it right – if you dance to what she’s playing – it’s overwhelming.

This ends with a couple of masterful bits – for my money the best writing of the entire book.

There’s this, “This is what I know. Sam is dead. My brother is dead. My mother is dead. My father is dead. My husband is dead. My cat is dead. And my dog who was dead in 1957 is still dead. Yet still I keep thinking that something wonderful is about to happen.”

Or this, “I saw myself with Sam in his kitchen in Kentucky and we were talking about writing. In the end, he was saying, everything is fodder for a story, which means, I guess, that we’re all fodder.”

As I read all that, as I listen to the eventual music of her work, I find the best way to appreciate it is to “dance” as well, to write along with her and to remember that ugly not-so-long-ago end to the Year of the Monkey.

In other words, what Smith accomplishes here is a solid draft toward living in Trump times. As I reflect on the book as a whole, it begins to feel more and more like a post-punk effort (like Jonathan Lethem’s A Feral Detective) to confront the strange Trumpian power to destabilize the real and the true.

There’s still a lot to work out in all of this approach, and I think others will eventually exceed Smith as she does it here, but she’s pointing the way. It’s good to imagine a world where the deaths of those we love unsettle something larger than ourselves. And it’s good to imagine a world where the esoteric things we value turn out to have a currency wider than they can in the real world.

To sum it up, our charged political moment, one where truth has been eviscerated, needs a reminder in the power of the imagination. Smith has been exploring art that resists the narratives of power for forty years. She’s still at it, and the music she makes is enough to get me out of my seat. Getting off your butt is a necessary step in fighting despair. The dancing can follow from there.


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