Just Kids is Patti Smith's memoir about her early adulthood, and particularly, her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe.
I really didn't like it.
I thought I would.
I should have liked it. Art! Punk Rock! Theatre! What's not to like?
The narrative read as an emotionless chronicle of (what should have been?) a passionate time and series of experiences. Smith relentlessly catalogs the personalities she encountered (lists of 5-10 names were common):
"Through [Bobby Neuwirth] I had met Todd [Rundgren], the artist Bruce Marden and Larry Poons, and the musicians Billy Swann, Tom Paxton, Eric Andersen, Roger McGuinn, and Kris Kristofferson."
I know that for some, that list could read like a series of explosions. "You met who!? When!? All at once??!" To me, it looked like name dropping, and not in service of the narrative. I found Smith's writing, when it wasn't downright awkward ("It was within that atmosphere that I seethed.") then uncomfortably remote and passionless (as when she explains her numerous breakups, including with Mapplethorpe).
My favorite college professor (and, lucky for me, my current book group compatriot) talks about (possibly invented the term???) the Apostolary Narrative. It's meant to be a play on the Epistolary Narrative (books through letters), and it describes the kind of book where the Apostles get to tell the story, and the story isn't theirs. The New Testament, obviously, is one. The Great Gatsby is one (Nick is the Apostle, Jay Gatsby gets to be the Christ). I'd throw Brideshead Revisited and My Antonía into the mix. Hopefully my prof will weigh in with a better list.
When I got to the end of Just Kids, and read the epilogue explaining that Smith was responding to Mapplethorpe's dying request that she "tell their story," I realized that was the problem. The book was posing as an apostolary narrative, but was actually written as a memoir, and so succeeded at neither.
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