Brian Dillon
Rage inside the machine: in Kevin Killian’s product reviews of books, films, and sundry items, a poetic project to “queer everything.”
Selected Amazon Reviews, by Kevin Killian,
Semiotext(e), 697 pages, $32.95
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Who among us writers could have known, at the dawn of youthful literary ambition, the squalid indignities that would follow? Never mind the antique horrors (and the pleasures of hating) that traditional print reviews once delivered; to be a published author in the twenty-first century means being hourly tempted online by malign or mocking consumer judgments of your hard-forged sentences. A rule of literary life: never respond to the ordinary book-buyer who does not care for your work. But what of actual writers who are on there too, skewering their colleagues behind poorly secured usernames? Hello you, mildly well-known art historian who trashed one of my books on Goodreads and recommended I read—what? Why one of your own, of course. And you, minor British biographer who did the same on Amazon, and an hour later favorably reviewed your own book. Five stars, a masterpiece! After a quarter-century of this stuff, a strange question to ask would be: Is real criticism possible on the likes of Amazon?
In 2003, the American writer Kevin Killian—a pioneer of the New Narrative tendency, alongside his wife Dodie Bellamy and the likes of Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, and Robert Glück—had a heart attack, and subsequently suffered a long bout of writer’s block. According to Bellamy, who adds an afterword to Selected Amazon Reviews, Killian started composing short reviews while he recovered, just a sentence or two, and posting them on Amazon like any other customer who had an opinion about The Lost Boys or a biography of Rin Tin Tin or a guide to rebuilding one’s player piano. The texts slowly got longer, until it was obvious to Killian that they constituted “a poetic project.” He died in 2019, by which time he had written and published (if that is the word) almost 2,400 of them—or 1,087,107 words. Selected Amazon Reviews—a hefty hardback styled, mischievously, after the Library of America series—collects a small portion of what poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum, in a preface, calls Killian’s “spunky bonbons.” The author himself: “This was my regimen, therapy, if you will.”
According to Koestenbaum, in these pieces, Killian was “doing a Sontag but without the severity.” Though some of what he wrote is remarkably close to traditional print criticism, it comes with an engaging, eccentric reviewerly persona and an enthusiast or even activist remit on behalf of innovative fiction and (especially) poetry. He hymns the long poetic line of Jorie Graham, which moves “like a centipede on a tightrope”; he commends Ron Padgett’s biography of Joe Brainard, and Amy Gerstler’s poetry collection Ghost Girl. When reviewing more obvious or mainstream writers, Killian can sound oddly conventional, even banal. Of a restored edition—correcting Ted Hughes’s choice and order—of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, he writes: “At $24.95, the book’s a little expensive, but it feels as though money had been spent on its planning and execution, so you don’t feel rooked.” On a collection of essays by Edmund White: “It’s a book that deserves all the praise it will doubtless receive.” The sincerity, I suspect, is both real and part of the game of contriving the top-100, “Hall of Fame” reviewer called “Kevin Killian.”
Selected Amazon Reviews is full of such small moments of ambiguity and more or less comic unreliability. Killian was born in Smithtown, New York, and educated at Fordham and Stony Brook universities. He did not live abroad as a child, but here he is to be found reminiscing in various reviews about his years in France, including the time he became “mesmerized by an enchanting painting of an ancestor that hung never very far from the hearth.” Such details, it seems, are part of the project’s effort to “queer everything,” as Bellamy puts it: for the bisexual Killian and his Amazon-bound avatar, cultural products are opportunities to float an equivocal identity, both self-concealing and flagrant. A lot of his Amazon reviews are about Hollywood movies that he found even more camp than they may seem. He watches Katharine Hepburn films, but skips her scenes to concentrate on marginal figures and incidents. He has an uncanny knack for spotting brittle or tragic stars—Elizabeth Montgomery, the inscrutable Capucine—especially when miscast.
And then, quite brilliantly, there are Killian’s reviews of sundry consumer products, unrelated to art or culture. (Reader, if you’re dithering over the six-hundred-plus pages and the hardback sticker price, these pieces are themselves alone worth the price of admission.) Once more according to Bellamy, Killian “rejoiced in the not-useful ratings his reviews received.” Writing up the Wood Diner Birdhouse by Meadow Creek Trading, which is genuinely a birdhouse in the shape or guise of a diner, he comments: “The things you do for these birds, after all, you do for Saint Francis, who loved his feathered friends as he loved the moon and the sun.” Under the title “I Love This Puppet,” he reviews Darwin the Wizard Marionette but neglects to mention the wizard’s alarming googly eyes and spindly fingers. Instead, Killian tells prospective buyers: “I bought Darwin on a whim, wanting to produce some magic spells to get myself a raise at work.”
Are Killian’s reviews similarly crafted to make something supernatural happen to the machinery of capital? When he started writing them twenty years ago, Amazon was only a decade old: ubiquitous, yes, but not yet running our world alongside the other tech behemoths. It wasn’t yet obvious that, as selling stuff and social media meshed, we would all end up as low-level admin drudges, data-entry clerks doing unpaid work for fascist-adjacent billionaires. But here we are, and the dream of squatting inside the machine, or intruding funny, subversive, demotic “criticism” or “poetry” into the cracks in capital’s hulk, may now seem somewhat fanciful or beside the point. Still, Selected Amazon Reviews exists, and its pleasures as well as Killian’s acuteness seem rescued from the wreckage, like lewd graffiti on the walls at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Criticism, says Koestenbaum, “is not a parasitic art; it is a way of saving one’s own life.” So it proved for Killian (his writing life, anyway), and the result is smart, scurrilous, humane.
Brian Dillon’s Affinities: On Art and Fascination, Suppose a Sentence, and Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction are published by New York Review Books. He is working on Ambivalence, a book about teaching, learning, and Virginia Woolf.