Kicking

by Leslie Dick

Set in the London and New York underground culture's of the '70s and '80s, Kicking tracks the adventures of a group of close friends through the ambiguous pleasures and dangers of those years. Connie West's attachment to Mikey Stour begins one Sunday afternoon in 1969 on an expedition to the romantic wilderness of Highgate cemetery. Their relationship over the next twenty years is a convoluted one, intersected by the lives of friends and lovers, among them Iris, whose eccentric path is to have a strange impact on their own. Connie discovers that the emotional imprint of one's past never dies but lies buried under the surface until, alive and kicking, sometimes as comic epiphany. Here is a witty and psychologically acute portrayal of a vibrant world of artists and writers, of drug addiction and the impulse toward self-destruction, of all the ferocious loves and betrayals that change people forever. Leslie Dick is the author of Without Falling (City Lights), a novel. She divides her time between London and Los Angeles, where she teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.

243 pages, Paperback

First published May 11, 1992

Reviews

[Jena · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this much better than Dick's other novel, "Without Falling." I was introduced to her work via an essay she wrote on Kathy Acker, and WF was clearly trying a bit hard to fall into the non-linear, Burroughs mash-up/cut-out genre that Acker did so brilliantly. But Ariadne's thread is missing, because, the main character in WF is a hollowed out version of a real person. Acker's characters are hollowed out, too, but they are also stuffed with the blood and guts of western literary history, feminism, philosophy, and Acker's own raw insides. In contrast, "Kicking" is more traditional in form. It follows a brief period in the main character's life as she travels to NYC to present a paper and is mostly made up of the recollections inspired by the people she reunites with there. Which is to say, it isn't really about heroin at all, but something much more familiar: a woman, ostensibly grown-up, remembering her not-so-distant past with characters reminiscent of the crazies I knew and loved in college. She's neurotic and insecure at times, but nonetheless likable for all that. She's like you, and at the end of the book she hasn't so much grown up as she has simply relaxed her vice-like grip on madness, secure enough now to take a bit of kicking from that dangerous brat, Nostalgia, without letting her life fall apart.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my favorite book in college. The narrative is not in linear order. And it took me about 3 reads, before I fit the narrative together in my mind. But a very satisfying puzzle.

[Carol Scherer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great story about positive empowered women!