Review: Godlike by Richard Hell
In his new novel Godlike, (Akashic Books) musician / poet / film critic / artist Richard Hell illuminates the Lower East Side of a rapidly decaying - but artistically flourishing - New York City. The story is covered in a film of dirty desperation of the artists and poets of the time, when New York City still had grime underneath its fingernails and a livable apartment could be had "... on the south side of East 6th Street between First and Second Avenues, second floor rear, for $90 a month." Just as Dawn Powell (The Golden Spur, The Wicked Pavilion, and Turn, Magic Wheel) did for downtown in the 1940s, Hell does for the 1970s.

Structured as "hospital notebooks," Godlike is the story of the relationship between the poet Paul Vaughn and his much younger admirer, Randall Terence ("R.T.") Wode. (The married Vaughn is 27 when 16-year-old R.T. arrives in New York City.) Committed to a hospital to dry out in the present day (1997), Vaughn looks back with longing, admiration and despair on the years spent with Wode, writing, fucking, and drinking. Hell shifts the novel between the first and the third persons, lyrically seizing the slacker lifestyle of the time, where time is spent reading, creating, drinking and eking out enough money to survive.

Hell's writing is sublimely descriptive. Here, you can almost feel the scratchy blanket and smell the rotting carpet of the cheap hotel R.T. has holed up in:

"He suddenly realized what a good thing it would be to have a cup of coffee and then to pull the cheap fabric of musty print curtains across the grey window and lie naked in the bed underneath the covers with a book, relishing his own tiredness at 6:45 in the morning, light stenciled in borders around the curtains."

Scattered throughout is poetry, both original compositions from Hell, and pieces from such modern poets as Rene Ricard and Ron Padgett. While it is a novel about poets, the poetry does not overwhelm the text, but compliments it. (The poetic collaboration between Paul and R.T. is actually quite good.) Godlike is a concise, elegant novel that doesn't waste words, a small, creased and dog-eared photograph of the blank generation that yuppie gentrification exterminated.

Godlike by Richard Hell. Akashic Books
- posted by Synd-e @ 7:38 PM