The Unlikely Book Club

Second in a series of books that I wouldn’t have been likely to read: The Virgin of Bennington, by Kathleen Norris. (First in the series was Nick Tosches’s “Trinities,” an international mob drug novel.) Tripped on this one in the stacks, and the Bennington connection caught my eye, though it turns out to have almost nothing to do with Bennington, other than that she went to Bennington College, which figures for about half a chapter in the book. It’s the memoirs of a poet who was in the midst of the New York poetry scene in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Unfortunately, it is written with the sensibilities of someone from an earlier time, and the structure skips around mercilessly. She drops little bombs but they barely go off because she hasn’t given them any context or elaboration: “One would hardly think that the publication of a small book of verse could be so disruptive, but Falling Off turned my life inside out, and made such wreckage of the year 1971 that it seemed a good idea to retreat at Christmas.” No further evidence of the wreckage is forthcoming, and then she tells us very little of use about her retreat. I made it 90 pages, now I think I’m done. You would think that someone who was there when Patti Smith fused poetry with rock ‘n’ roll would have something more to say than “I learned that Smith had developed a unique style, rock poetry half sung, half chanted to the accompaniment of an electric bass. She left her audience exhilarated, and I rode the subway home believing more than ever in the power of art to illuminate and transcend the ordinary.” Whatever.