Woo Woo (Ella Baxter, A&U)

In Woo Woo, Ella Baxter’s raucous second novel after New Animal, art is terrible, a living spell, a parasite, a trick, and all there is. ‘Art is life,’ writes protagonist Sabine on her socials bio. ‘No babe, we’ve been through this,’ says Sabine’s friend Ruth, ‘art is art’. It’s the week before Sabine’s exhibition, Fuck You, Help Me, at Goethe—which boasts the second-biggest advertising budget in the gallery’s history—and Sabine keeps acting stranger. Sabine makes human-sized puppets (‘gothic skins’) and photographs her nude self wearing them. Her husband, Constantine, swears he ages twenty years in the week leading up to her showings. ‘Imagine what it’s like for me,’ says Sabine. Between bouts of sleeplessness, neediness, gorging, obsession, chugging, and spontaneous live streaming, Sabine is stalked by the increasingly ominous Rembrandt Man and consoled by the ghost of artist Carolee Schneemann. In ripe-to-fetid and deliciously droll prose, Baxter ponders what shapes our fury, our fear and our selfhood might take in the wake of men’s violence, turbo-capitalism and being extremely online, and makes a titillating case for going feral, committing fully to the bit, and haunting our enemies forever. Woo Woo is a spooky, darkly combustible feast for fans of Sally Olds’s People Who Lunch, Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle’s Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life, Ania Walwicz, Miranda July, Melissa Broder and Dorothea Lasky, and anyone who’s ever wanted to run naked into a forest, screaming.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Mel Fulton is a writer, editor, and host of Literati Glitterati on Triple R. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Category: Friday Unlocked reviews Reviews