Book Review: Epiphany. Reading M Train by multi-talented rock star Patti Smith, I realized that I don't care much for memoir. Yes, I know it's the hipster cool genre of the moment (thank you, Oprah!) and now no one will ever again talk to me at parties (well, they didn't before either). I liked Just Kids, her previous memoir, quite a bit, but this fell flat, perhaps reflecting her own dragging outlook at the time. M Train (memory train? mind train? did I miss it?) is really an elegy to the great love of her life, Fred "Sonic" Smith, former guitarist for the Detroit rock group the MC5 (MC = Motor City). How wonderful, what a treasure, that she had such a person in her life. But Smith doesn't really talk much about her feelings, about the pain, not like Joan Didion would've. Bits and pieces of their life together, glimpses but nothing substantive of their children, not much about her and her vision of her life at the time. For which I don't blame her, I wouldn't cut myself open either, but then I wouldn't have written the book. Patti Smith writes well-crafted sentences, is quirky as hell, but doesn't give a whole lot. She's no longer the daring punk rock poet of the 70's who stuck her pen in her heart and spilled it all over the stage. We know what she eats: always hip food. She likes detective shows on TV (she doesn't use the word "TV," always "television") and coffee (I can relate).
Because Smith is the artist that she is she gets to travel all around the world to symposiums, conferences, and literary events. While there she seeks out the graves of and sites important to famous people (mostly writers), and celebrates symbolic rites in their honor. But she rarely tells us much of what she likes about these famous people, what effect they had on her, how they inspired her. Is it just because they're famous? I doubt it, but what? Tell me. There's a lot about what she eats, there are her rituals, talismans, lists of objects and the power of objects, coffee, and even more coffee, even more detective shows. In the midst of her travels she can stop in England to watch detective shows on BBC for awhile. Smith believes in sympathetic magic like Merricat in Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle. She collects objects obsessively, but doesn't always explain the provenance or meaning of her collections. For someone who believes in the power and interplay of objects, she seems to work awfully hard at losing things. You'll want Patti Smith's life: she's always beatnik cool and everyone makes the perfect meaningful comment at the perfect time. She even has recurring dreams in which a cowboy comes and talks to her about what's been happening in her life lately.
There are three moments in the book that were especially telling: (1) While living in Michigan, Smith drinks her morning coffee in a lot behind the local fish-and-tackle store, which to her looks like Tangier, her own private Morocco -- it's a magical moment to find Tangier in a vacant lot in Michigan; (2) She celebrates her life with Fred, as a time of "the clock with no hands," in which the everyday events of life, sump pumps, ironing shirts, "seem a miracle" as they were spent together; (3) First she discovers and then immerses herself in Haruki Murakami, one artist finding another. M Train is very much a bookend to Just Kids. That book dealt with the beginning of Smith's artistic life, her first adult ventures into creation, with her great doomed love, Robert Mapplethorpe. This book is written toward the end of her artistic life, when words don't come so easy (as when she put out four arguably groundbreaking records in five years), her children are grown, after the devastating loss of her one true love. I'm glad I read it, but here I don't feel Patti met me halfway. Not like in Just Kids. [3 Stars]
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