On rereading The Orange Eats Creeps

Grace Krilanovich was a local phenomenon when I first read The Orange Eats Creeps, or at least that was my impression at the time. I was a San Francisco “alt weekly” arts journalist in the 90s, but by the time of the book’s publication I had just come back from a couple years in Japan and was pretty removed from any literary scene. For those reasons, I think, it was hard to separate my own reception of it from a vague sense of legend around its author. I found it compelling, but also annoying, mainly for the lifestyle led by the characters, I suppose, but also, now that I think about it, for the absolution granted by the protagonist for the actions committed by and against her, by means of her own teenage delusion, but also the literary conceits that generated a sense of distance from something depressingly familiar. I think anyone who spent their bohemian youth on the West Coast in the 90 and 00s would recognize the people Krilanovich writes about. The conceits, on the other hand, included vampires and the late Romantic tradition of transcendental transgression running from Coleridge and De Quincey to the Beats and Kathy Acker, conceits the book’s reception fell into. It also included the sense that Krilanovich was, in updated épater la bourgeoisie style, knowingly writing about disturbing content, at least to a certain kind of reader, through the obfuscating lens of literature. I remember telling a writer friend of mine something like this, if not exactly in those terms, and they seemed surprised at my response.

My estimation of the book grew in my mind over the years, because it seemed less and less the kind of book people were writing, much less publishing. Reading it again fifteen years later brings home this feeling, such that I find it hard this time to separate my reception not from the author's persona but from my own nostalgia. What bothered me before about the characters and their milieu has faded for me, as content tends to fade faster over time, leaving the ruins of form, which lasts, if it’s there. Those kids seem unbelievably free now in a way that I don’t think kids, wayward or not, are anymore, for better or worse, and the book is written with the kind of wildness I don’t think most young writers would even attempt now. The decision to pile on in relentless fashion denarrativized fragments, rather than arrange them into some kind of dramatic arc strikes me as one example of this. Krilanovich’s skill as a writer stands out more to me; what had seemed to be fugue-state automatic writing strikes me now as very controlled, more deliberate in its line and larger structures than it seems to be, which is remarkable. It is a curious book, similar in this way to The Tunnel, which is also a text I have found to mutate when I return to it over the years, to the degree that it’s not just my own impressions that have changed. I hesitate to say so, and this is more a comment on the general culture from the point of view of an older man, but Orange Eats Creeps feels to be the last great novel written by a young person in America. There is a sadness here that I don't think was here before and I'm not sure completely belongs to the book. But then, everything does in the end.