Subject: Review: SKIN by Kathe Koja

From: [email-masked]!mcb (Michael C. Berch)
Date: 27 Jun 93 00:25:02 GMT

SKIN
                           by Kathe Koja
                       (Delacorte, March 1993)

                     Reviewed by Michael C. Berch

If your world includes video cassettes of Survival Research Laboratory
shows, if you listen to bands like Throbbing Gristle and Severed Heads,
if you can name three body piercing studios in San Francisco, New
York,  or L.A., and would without hesitation head down to the warehouse
district for a performance art show advertised on hastily-Xeroxed
flyers splattered on the plywood fences of construction sites, then
SKIN is definitely for you.

Even if you're not *quite* there yet, but the material above pushes a
few buttons for you, some of them tinged with squickiness, check it out
anyway: it's a pretty good book, and unlike RE/Search Publications'
MODERN PRIMITIVES, there are no pictures.

SKIN is Kathe Koja's third novel, and first to go hardcover.
Underneath all the hype, and the screaming and droning industrial
art-in-motion, the blood (theatrical), and the blood (real), it's a
novel about artists, about the dynamic tensions of relationships, and
about people who barely, just barely, channel their obsessions and
madness into creativity.  The spark of the novel, the open question
that Koja sets up and explores, is what happens when the obsessions can
no longer be contained.

At the center of SKIN are two women: first Tess, a metal sculptor whose
attachment to the art is not recognition, gallery openings, sales, or
even satisfaction with the objects she makes, but is instead focused
tightly on "the burn", the act of producing molten metal, its steam and
crackle, the smoke when it contacts wood or plastic...or flesh.  Into
her studio walks Bibi, sometime dancer and performance artist with a
small troupe of industrial culture and piercing enthusiasts who
practice (and hang out) in an old warehouse.  And the collision of the
two produces a new project:  The Surgeons of the Demolition, performing
first for free, then selling tickets to what becomes a dedicated, even
frenzied, cult audience.

Koja tantalizes the reader with large-as-life descriptions of the
Surgeons' mechanized show props -- Archangel, Mme Lazarus, the Triple
Deaths, and the performances themselves: Actual Torque, Slave to the
Burn.  The language of SKIN is constantly hot, molten, seething, like a
humid night where everything is red and itching and not even ice water
helps: "Tess said less, watching the dancers, thinking of the rhythm in
metal, in corroding iron, in the slick long limbs of steel.  Could it
be found?  Could she find it? ... Branches of mastery, hints and feints
and driving piston hearts, the drip of machine oil, the stutter of
living flesh mechanically enabled ... See those dancers now, and
imagine them locked in ballerina combat with the grip and clench of
metal, the sweet smoke of rosin solder like incense around their
dripping faces, imagine them lit with a hundred strobes and the
subsonic growl of bass-heavy music like the throb of an engine running
hot, burning hot, burning hot like the white heart of the arc."

Wow.

Amazingly, Koja keeps it up for 300 pages, but underneath the actinic
glare of the welding torch is a surprisingly human story, by turns
tender and bitter, involving the complex relationship of Tess and Bibi,
and the men and women of the Surgeons and their hangers-on -- dancers,
constructors, friends, lovers, each described in vivid brushstrokes of
prose, and followed as the group forms (and breaks) alliances and
factions.

But success does not render the Surgeons tame and complacent.  Like all
artists of the _avant-garde_, they are constantly (and contradictorily)
seeking the *next* wave -- Tess turning back toward the burn and her
machinery; Bibi to the horizons of body-play: piercings, cuttings,
epiphanies of pain and redemption.  Unsurprisingly, the Surgeons gyrate
wildly out of control, and eventually their world is sundered by
violence and jealousy.

SKIN is not easy reading, or light diversion.  Koja's prose style is
fluid and impressionistic, with a rhythm keenly matched to the subject
and characters.  Unlike some other novels and stories purporting to
cover the industrial culture and body-play movement, Koja jumps in with
both feet, allowing the reader to avoid any sense of being a tourist in
a freak show, but instead immersing us as if we were participants.  And
the mechanical technologies and clinical aspects -- to the extent that
they can -- remain in the background; SKIN is foremost a novel about
human emotions: love and anger, trust and betrayal, pain and healing.
Even for readers to whom the world described is as alien as the surface
of a distant planet, SKIN is likely to be absorbing and hard to put
down.

-----

%A Koja, Kathe
%T Skin
%I Abyss / Delacorte Press / Bantam Doubleday Dell
%C New York
%D March 1993
%G ISBN 0-385-30899-X
%O US$19.95
%P 309pp, hardcover

--
Michael C. Berch  
[email-masked] / [email-masked] / [email-masked]