Generation Loss

by Elizabeth Hand

Book Overview

A photographer finds herself in deep waters when sent in search of a reclusive artist. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1931520216
• ISBN13: 9781931520218
• Release Date: April 2007
• Publisher: Small Beer Press
• Length: 265 Pages
• Weight: 1.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

I have been unable to forget this book since I read it.

Cass is a has-been photographer in her 40s who achieved momentary fame as a chronicler of the wasted punk scene in New York City in the late 1970s. Since then has been a slow slide into obscurity and despair; she's now as dead as you can be while still having a pulse. Then she gets an offer to go to rural Maine to interview a reclusive woman photographer who once pioneered a dreamlike photography technique. Cass leaves her rancid NYC apartment for the harsh and frozen shore of Maine. There she meets a strange young man who simultaneously repels and attracts her, and a troubled teenage girl who will go missing. Those are just the first of the lunatics and psychopaths she meets. As she gets better acquainted with the townfolk, she uncovers a dark secret that stretches back to the reckless actions of mystical group of drop-outs in the late 1960s. Cass herself is an unforgettable character who gets several very funny lines. Aside from the pleasures of accompanying such a complex person through such a spooky landscape, you learn a lot about photography in a subtle way that never slows the action. This is a precise, realistic, and haunting mystery. Longer review at BellaOnline Mystery Books (BellaOnline-dot-com).

Hand's Best Novel

If you were expecting science fiction or fantasy, this is not your Elizabeth Hand book (try her first hit novel, Winterlong: A Novel). With that out of the way, this is a well-researched, character-driven thriller, and in my opinion the best Hand novel to date. I'd definitely put it in my top 10 of books read this year. I think the author worked hard to make Generation Loss more accessible than her earlier books by keeping the pace moving and keeping the vocabulary at the high school level. She displays her usual flair for description and keen eye for characters on the fringe of society. The novel begins with our down-and-out noire heroine, Cassandra Neary. Once a moderately successful art photographer, she has given up on her art career and started living paycheck to paycheck as a bookstore stockroom employee. A call from an acquaintance sends her to an isolated island community off the coast of Maine to interview the photographer whose work had first inspired her own work. Unable to resist, she heads out to the islands to meet her idol. Cassandra is understandable but not predictable, and her sarcastic humor and temptation to cause mischief make her endearing without being approachable. I almost could have skipped the action/thriller portion of the book and just kept playing voyeur into Cassandra's life. Overall, I would highly recommend this novel to people who want a creepy and fascinating summer read.

Atmospheric

I've been a fan of Elizabeth Hand since Waking the Moon. WtM remains my favorite of her books, followed by her short story collections Last Summer at Mars Hill and Cleopatra Brimstone, and her novel Black Light. I had a difficult time with 2004's Mortal Love, as I felt there was a rather tortured effort to make it more "literary" than its predecessors and the result was a beautifully written fever dream of a book that was just too hard to follow. So, I was curious to see what Generation Loss would be like, and in some ways, it seems to be something of a departure. I liked it, mind you, but there were some elements missing that usually surface in her books (the rich and evocative use of language, the supernatural element), and I could not quite figure out what kind of book this was meant to be. Horror story? Mystery? Fantasy? About halfway through, I had to stop and do an Internet search to see what I could find about the book, and was lucky enough to come across an interview wherein Ms Hand states that in GL, she attempts to cut down on the use of what she terms "purple" prose, and that she decided to dispense with the supernatural. Once I had this sorted out, I was able to sit back and just take the story on face value without waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak. Especially as the story winds its way to the end, due to the hints dropped here and there and because of the extremely spooky, Halloween-like atmosphere, I kept expecting (hoping for, actually!) some disaffected old god to step out from one of the bare and chilly trees, but you can relax: it's not going to happen, at least not in this book, although the sinister possibility does seem to be just a breath away. So, just in case anyone else is wondering what kind of book this is going to be: it's a pretty straightforward story of a woman in one of the worst downward spirals I have ever seen, and not how she redeems herself, necessarily, but perhaps how she finds a place for herself. Generation Loss is the story of Cassandra Neary, a washed-up relic of the New York 70s punk scene. Cass is a photographer briefly famous for a series of shocking photographs, including some taken of a victim of a drug overdose found lying in the street. It's worth noting that upon discovering the body, no one, not even Cass, bothers to call the police. After all, he's already dead, what can anyone do? This scene is meant to illustrate Cass's utter disassociation from her own and other people's humanity, and does so very effectively, I might add. (I was reading this while clutching a strap on the train home, and my gasp of horror briefly alarmed my fellow strap-hangers.) I liked that Cass's problems are not merely presented as moral failings that she could correct if she wanted to; at one point, there is a brief, almost glossed-over mention of a clinical diagnosis of mental illness, although Cass certainly never seeks treatment. At any rate, over the 30 years since her incredibly brief near-glory,