‘Crudo’ Is a Debut Novel With a Real-Life Novelist in Thin Disguise

English writer Olivia Laing is the author of three perceptive books of nonfiction, books in whichyou fill the margins with avid little ticks of approval. These have been hybrids, blends of criticism and memoir.

“To the River” (2011) was a travel book of a sort — a walk along the River Ouse in Yorkshire, in which Virginia Woolf killed herself, combined with thinking about the nature of biography. “The Trip to Echo Spring” (2013) combined a journey through America with Laing’s consideration of drinking, addiction and creativity.

“Crudo” is Laing’s slim first novel, and it’s less persuasive than her earlier work. Fiction, it seems, is a genre she’s still feeling her way into. This is a hard book to get a handle on, and a harder one to describe. Like her nonfiction, it’s a pretzel twist of form and meaning.

“Crudo” is set in 2017. Its protagonist is a 40-year-old writer named Kathy who is preparing for her wedding. Meanwhile Kathy is online, fretting about the state of the planet. Trump, Brexit, assorted shootings, the immolation of London’s Grenfell Tower, the death of John Ashbery: Every push notice conspires to widen the spider crack in her fragile psyche.

There’s a certain amount of fictionalized autobiography here. The novel takes place in real time and Laing, too, married last year.

What makes “Crudo” — the Italian word for raw — genuinely strange is that Kathy also shares certain biographical details with Kathy Acker, the eclectic downtown punk writer and performance artist who died of breast cancer in 1997 at 50.

Acker’s best-known books include the novels “Blood and Guts in High School” and “Great Expectations.” Laing’s Kathy has also written books with these titles. Both appeared in an erotic art film titled “Blue Tape.” Both worked in strip clubs.

Inserting a personage who strongly resembles Kathy Acker into a book set in 2017 is, it must be said, a very Kathy Acker thing to do. Acker often wrote pastiche; the first chapter of her “Great Expectations” is titled “Plagiarism” and artfully revisits Dickens’ novel.

Acker appropriated from many other writers. She was at times a cutup artist à la William S. Burroughs. She wrote a chapbook (I suddenly want to find a copy) titled “Hello, I’m Erica Jong.” She had no qualms about reappropriating anyone’s story.

In Acker fashion, Laing smuggles bits of text from other sources into “Crudo,” sometimes identifying these snippets as such but often not. (All citations are provided in an index.) Most are from Acker herself. Others are from sources as far-flung as Donald Trump’s tweets and articles on The Daily Stormer, the neo-Nazi website.

Laing’s Kathy, although she is marrying, remains a wild child, committed to little except her instincts. She’s addicted to travel. “A migrant bird, she was compelled to fly,” Laing writes. Like the protagonists in novels by Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy, whose writing Laing’s can resemble, Kathy is drawn south. “She wanted novelty and heat,” Laing writes, “she wanted to unhook herself.”

Kathy worries about aging. “Weightlessness was another exclusive possession of the very young,” she thinks. “Later on you started clanking around like tins tied to a car.”

Laing strikes some terrific chords in this novel. About bohemian life then and now, for example, she observes: “New York dirt, no big deal, just eight generations of people living in the same small rooms.” Kathy happens to pick up a book that seems to be Nicholson Baker’s “U and I,” about John Updike. Here’s Laing’s perfect description of Baker: “a pornographer with good syntax, a lusty grammarian.”

One mentally pushes back, at times, against the palimpsest of Acker that exists under Laing’s Kathy. You’re not sure you want to imagine this indomitable counterculture figure losing it over a patio (“They got home and saw the deck, painted an unexpected brown, and she’d screamed and screamed”), scrolling through social media to see who is having a better vacation than she is or dining on potato foam or white peach bellinis or “panna cotta like a severed breast” and worrying about her weight.

Laing evokes the shattered, dreamlike quality of much of Acker’s work. Yet at moments the prose can be pretentious, verging on parody. “She dreamt of Sebastien, she dreamt he was on a beach with Tracey Emin”; “She missed the sense of time as something serious and diminishing”; “Kathy was becoming obsessed with the numbness”; “there were too many pastries and radiators in her life.”

There’s a did-this, did-that quality to “Crudo,” a sense that everything matters yet nothing does, that can make one feel a bit ill, as if you’ve caught an intellectual and emotional flu, the way that being online too long can do. I suspect this was partly Laing’s intention.

Kathy isn’t likable; Laing did not intend her to be. This novel reminds you that while travel is said to be improving, the people who do the most of it tend to be the ones you least want to be around.

In “Crudo,” no actual crudo — a dish of raw fish, usually presented with olive oil and a regal variety of salt — is consumed. This astringent yet oddly desultory book, a curio from a very good writer, more resembles, for good and ill, an anchovy.

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“Crudo”

By Olivia Laing

141 pages. W.W. Norton & Co. $21.