By John K. Peck

---

Each era of punk carries within it the seeds of its own destruction; accordingly, one epoch’s self-immolation germinates the beginnings of the next.

A mere five years after the Sex Pistols played their first show in London, Robert, protagonist of Looking for a Kiss, describes his partner’s hoarding of the soon-to-be-dead epoch:

Marlene had bought the clothes up like they were going out of fashion, which they were—in the late 70s and very early 80s, when punk had finished and no one wanted the clothes anymore, you could buy them on the cheap. Marlene would wear the clothes until she could no longer fit in them – whereupon she would store them in a suitcase for ever and ever.

In the nearly half-century since that gig, at the St Martin’s School of Art, the death/rebirth wheel has turned dozens of times. From our distant far-future year of 2024, the question must be asked: can a punk novel about the 70s still draw blood?

The answer, it turns out, is ‘yes’. While the primary era and setting of Looking for a Kiss is 1970s Camden, the book ranges through the decades, both forward and backwards. Whether it is a work of fiction, autofiction, or memoir is not particularly relevant; as Cathi Unsworth points out in her introduction, the author himself says that writing is less about truth or fiction and more about being ‘[. . . ] someone who can manipulate or hoodwink the reader into listening to them talk at length about that strange dream they have just had. So, the writer is a trickster.’

The trick here lies in keeping its two central characters, Robert and Marlene, in a sort of perpetual back-and-forth temporal motion, swinging like pendulums through the years – sometimes effortlessly, with past and future selves winking at one another over the decades; sometimes not, with desperation born from the occasional-nihilism of early punk multiplied by the weight of age, rendered exponentially heavier in the disappointment and creeping monoculture that mark the ensuing decades.

But while pessimism and self-negation form the dark gravitational center of Looking for a Kiss, it retains a kineticism that continually propels it onward, glancing off an impressive assemblage of like-minded texts as it does so. The book is a portrait of the author not just as a writer, but more frequently and adamantly as a reader. And it doesn’t just invoke other literary works: it draws them to itself and lashes them together as a sort of patchwork garment, or a raft on which to stay afloat.

These include not only latter 20th-century punk-adjacent luminaries such as J.G. Ballard and Greil Marcus, but also works of the early 20th, 19th, and previous centuries. The book serves as a sort of grand bibliography of underground and transgressive fiction from the past hundred years, and this new expanded edition also includes a generous selection of introductory and supplementary texts: essays, journal entries, and actual bibliographies by Cabut and others, which provide context without watering down the rawness of the narrative.

And raw it is: the book starts with a nighttime acid trip by the canals of Camden, where past, present, and future merge in a swampy psychosexual mire. As Robert stares out over the canals in a reverie, watching a stream of urine wind its way riverlike toward the waters, Marlene hears sounds and sees visions, including a mock-choir of aborted fetuses (her own), chattering noisily in the darkness.

There are numerous passages of graphic sex throughout, animalistic not in any romantic sense of operatic abandon, but more as reptilian or even insectoid acts of pure instinct, fueled by booze and amphetamines.

There are also countless petty cruelties between the pair, from verbal abuse to barely hidden affairs, all listed in meticulous detail. The accumulation of these spiteful and abject vignettes could become stifling, but like the best transgressive writing, its purpose is not to shock for its own sake but to cut through the irrelevant until the heart of the story is laid bare.

While the book’s earlier chapters return frequently to the canal-side acid-trip and have an almost liquid feel as they bob and swim through the winding canals that lead to different decades, its second half is more defined. Later chapters are less a curved aquatic meander than a hall of mirrors, marked by moments in which Robert looks into the past at his earlier self, or just as often, from the past to the present and beyond:

He saw himself standing in a room, looking at a framed photo.

He saw himself in the future looking at a photograph taken in the past of two young people, Robert and Marlene, grinning hard into a bright new tomorrow.

Both models – the murky canals, the endlessly collapsible reflection – untether the text from linearity and allow freedom of movement between eras. As the engine of the 20th century runs its course, sputtering from 80s to 90s, the hall of mirrors becomes more of a panopticon, with the author as both prisoner and warden, casting a harsh light on moments of weakness and despair, channeling them into a sort of lurching forward motion:

Robert was no longer able to look into the future at will. The visions of unfolding events that he had seen and felt would not be remembered. Sometimes, over the years, he would get the feeling that something very valuable had been in his embrace, his possession [. . . ] the only way to tell the future was to make it.

With no escape from the self, the only answer is to strip naked, rattle the bars, write on the walls in blood or filth, but above all else keep writing. As a whole the book returns repeatedly to a  dark (and decidedly French) symbolist core that hints at progenitors such as de Sade, Artaud, Genet, Bataille – works that were transgressive, antisocial, and sensual, writing decades in the future, planting primordial seeds that emerged as punk decades or centuries later. Looking for a Kiss sets itself afloat amongst these, and lets the canal carry it wherever it may lead.

---

About our contributor

---