(Harcourt)

www.harcourtbooks.com

Lady Lazarus is a positively maddening book, the kind that engenders both obsession and frustration. When I wasn’t hungrily turning the page to find out what happens next in Calliope Bird Morath’s quest to find out the truth about her rock star father, I was resisting the urge to throw the book across the room in annoyance at the narcissistic, utterly unself-aware biographer who’s attempting to chronicle the young woman’s life. Said biographer shares the same name as author Altschul and is obsessed with both the Truth and psych/lit-crit theory as explored in Lacan and Derrida-drenched interviews with the young Morath’s therapist. Yes, you guessed it; Altschul (the real one) is a creative writing teacher (at Standford) and Lady Lazarus is a meta-biography, a fictional tome that investigates the nature of biography and semiotics and fame and…aw, who the fuck cares?

Because in the end, Altschul the character is a pitiable mess without any redeeming qualities, and Altschul the writer would have been better off ditching that half of the book and simply focusing on Calliope’s story. It’s the tale of a confessional poet (the book’s name comes from a Sylvia Plath poem) who witnessed her father’s Kurt Cobain-esque suicide and spent the rest of her life (which may or may not have also ended by the book’s final pages) both coming to terms with that loss and trying to discern if her dad’s death was real or another Mr. Mojo Risin’ hoax.

Within those chapters lies some of the smartest, insightful, and flat-out funny writing about rock and roll celebrity since Neal Pollack’s Never Mind the Pollacks. The irony—oh, it wouldn’t be po-mo without irony, would it?—is that virtually all of the points Altschul (the writer and the character) make in those painfully ham-handed pages of explication are right there on the pages where Calliope herself lives and breathes so vividly.

Hence the 5 rating for Lady Lazarus: it isn’t so much an average as a split decision, with the Calliope chapters getting a 9, while the rest barely gets a 1. ERIC SCHUMACHER-RASMUSSEN