Author Lynn Crosbie holds her dog Frank as she poses for a picture in her home in Toronto, Wednesday April 29, 2015Mark Blinch/The Globe and Mail
Jeffrey Eugenides's debut novel, The Virgin Suicides, is narrated by a group of men trying to unravel the close-kept personal mysteries of the Lisbon sisters: five beautiful teenage girls who take their own lives. The narrators, obsessed with the Lisbon girls as teenagers, pore over photographs, personal effects and other artifacts in order to understand the girls, and their own macabre fascination with the conditions of their lives and deaths.
Among these relics is a diary belonging to Cecilia, "the weird sister" and the first to successfully off herself. The narrators absorb the document, dismantling the prose for clues, finding meaning and melancholy in the otherwise insignificant details of a 13-year-old girl's life. They analyze shifts in the prose, as the diary moves from spiked invective to poetry to descriptions of frozen-pizza dinners. Cecilia's diary is like a pubescent Rosetta Stone, unlocking the ever-inscrutable feminine mystique. "We felt the imprisonment of being a girl," says Eugenides's narrato(s), "the way it made your mind active and dreamy."
Lately in these precious column inches, I've known something of this imprisonment. I've been spending a lot of time locked in the brains of teenage girls. Or, more accurately, I've been spending a lot of time locked in the brains of adult women imitating, or imagining, the consciousness of teenage girls. First were the angsty paeans of Gayle Forman's I Was Here and Jasmine Warga's My Heart and Other Black Holes. Then there was Sara Taylor's sorta-young-adult teen metalhead rape-revenge fantasy, Boring Girls. Now, Lynn Crosbie's Where Did You Sleep Last Night, a novel split between 19-year-old, self-identified "Walmart goth" Evelyn Gray and her rock star lover, who may or may not be the reincarnation of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain.
In a tone-setting prologue nipped from Shakespeare, Evelyn describes this as "a story about two goofballs who are madly in love." When she meets the object of her tragic affections, the stars aren't so much cross'd as wonkily aligned. Waking up in a hospital after an overdose, Crosbie's teenage heroine glimpses "the pale, bark-brown-haired man … who someone had dressed in a Celine Dion T-shirt and plaid pyjama pants." She calls him "Sadness," for his sadness. "I hate joy and laughter," he tells her. And that about sums it up.
Rechristened Celine Black – after Canada's premier pop annoyance and, presumably, warbling Pixies front man Frank Black – Sadness quickly becomes Evelyn's paramour, partner in both literal and figurative crime. The two take off down America's West Coast, shacking up in seaside motels, doing smack, scribbling song lyrics in spiral notebooks, falling deeply, madly, dangerously in love.
They start bands, as kids do. Evelyn's is a Hole-styled snarl-rock project. Celine's group – which shares its name with Nirvana's debut record – blossoms into international stardom, carried by the conviction of his nearly impossible likeness (in appearance, manner and ineffable aura) to a grunge icon who killed himself, at the age of 27, in 1994.
When a psychiatrist probes Evelyn on her attraction to Celine, and its connection to her teenage infatuation with Kurt Cobain, she rejects the hypothesis. For her, it's not a matter of resemblance at all. "He is him," she insists. "He just is." After all, in an age when rock stars are revived by fancy hologram technology, why shouldn't a ghost front a rock band?
Crosbie makes this impossibility of reincarnation seem emotionally credible, with her book reading in places like a singular mash-up of fan fiction and magic realism. When, midway through the novel, Celine ponies up the dough to buy Cobain's old rural Washington State cottage, it seems less a gesture of imitation or reverence than a compulsion. He is drawn there.
Celine doesn't so much mimic Cobain's perfectly unruffled expression of "authenticity" as he inhabits it, like a pilled cardigan that fits just-so. Through Celine, Evelyn (and Crosbie in turn) is able to meditate on the guy often pegged as "the last rock star," without fawning over him directly. Evelyn's sadness is Celine's sadness is Cobain's sadness, which is the sadness of the generation(s) of bummed-out, twitchy youth that Nirvana's music spoke straight to, like a trickling needle spiking a mainline.
Like a twist on the inexpressible "feminine mystique" that Eugenides's narrators labour over in The Virgin Suicides, Where Did You Sleep Last Night reads a bit like a cipher for decoding the rock star mystique. As Celine shuffles, a little uncomfortably, through the template of alt-rock stardom, as Evelyn waffles between imposed roles as devoted wife, jealous partner and Courtney Love/Yoko Ono-ish toxic lamprey, it becomes clear that they're not just imprisoned by the shackles of fame or femininity, but by life itself. "When I die," Evelyn writes in a letter to Cobain's ghost, her mind hyperactive and dreamy, "I hope to find something waiting for me on the other side."
And this, perhaps, is Crosbie's plainest articulation of Kurt Cobain's sway of Gen X and its inheritors, what made him not just "the last rock star" but a real-deal martyr. In his life, and maybe especially in his death, Cobain seemed to be in commune with a world beyond our own – a more compassionate domain for the losers and hipsters and dreamers and dopers ill at ease in their own skin. The hope for Cobain is that he found his solace in death: in silence, stillness, the extinguishing of desire and delusion. In a word, nirvana.
Then again, maybe there's a next life. Maybe he's reborn, re-embodied, out there coiled comfortably in the arms of an adoring Walmart goth.