Tainted Love

L’enfant terrible of British post-punk iconoclasts, Stewart Home departs from his usual antinarrative in this, his tenth novel, an exploration of the memoir form. Supposedly culled from the pages of his mother’s unpublished diary (Home’s reputation as a trickster makes this claim hard to take at face value), it is a first-person fictional account of Jilly O’Sullivan, darling of the 1960s swinging London scene. Working as a highly paid hostess from the age of 16, Jilly cavorts her way through the ’60s, having a baby out of wedlock and giving him up for adoption (as Home’s own mother did) and rubbing elbows with the likes of Brian Jones and John Lennon.

Jilly experiments with drugs, religion, music, art, sex and whatever else anyone is selling. She delves deeply into each new scene that comes to London: beat, hippies, posthippie addiction and finally the crushing disillusionment that follows the decades of decadence. Jilly spends most of her short life as the proverbial fly on the wall. Though she records events like the Jack the Stripper murders and the Profumo scandal, the “diary” account is clearly written after the episodes unfolded, giving Jilly some distance on her tale. The huge events of the day don’t seem to affect her. She is detached and lethargic, as if exhausted by the years of hedonism, already uninterested in her story and its inevitable outcome: her suicide.

Home is outspoken about his views on the typical memoir: formulaic, uninteresting, safe. It’s fitting that his foray into the genre should be of a different flavor. He experiments with form, working in several screenplay-style chapters along with Jilly’s more straightforward remembrances. Though this may be his most conventional work yet, devotees of Home’s style will devour Jilly’s drug-fueled tales with the same worshipful ardor with which they consumed his previous work, even enjoying the idea that the ever-puckish Home is conning us yet again.—Beth Dugan