June 4, 2024
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.
August 19, 2024
Artist and novelist Baxter (New Animal) focuses her delightfully untamed latest on an unhinged photographer. Sabine is counting down the days until the opening of her exhibition Help Me, Fuck You, which features her nude self-portraits in gothic motifs. She struggles to communicate with her husband, and gives him ridiculous instructions for a photo shoot: “I am impregnating every image with my unruly, creative juju. Are you getting my full body in?” Later, while drunk and alone in their house, she encounters the ghost of artist Carolee Schneemann in the kitchen. Sabine sits down with the feminist performance artist, who agrees to mentor her (“We are going to look at creating false mayhem—that’s true art”). Carolee’s intervention shakes Sabine’s confidence about the value of her work, prompting her to trawl for validation on TikTok and to spiral when a follower leaves a negative comment. Making matters worse, a man dressed in black runs across her garden, then starts sending her threatening letters. Baxter expertly builds suspense via Sabine’s increasing distress and the presence of the stalker, and she succeeds at keeping readers guessing at the line between reality and Sabine’s twisted perceptions. Those with a fondness for unreliable narrators will have a blast. Agent: Dana Murphy, Trellis Literary.
Starred review from September 15, 2024
An artist blurs the line between reality and performance as she livestreams her stalker's abuses on the eve of an important gallery show. Sabine is a successful conceptual artist about to debut her newest work, "fifteen photographic portraits of her...covered from head to toe in sheer costumes. These wearable puppets, several feet long...featured silicone faces that Sabine could position over her own." Titled things like "Crone," "Baby," "Stay at Home Mother," and "Baba Yaga," the portraits purport to explore the archetypes of female identity as experienced by the individual, and singular, female artist. Or, as Sabine explains it to a collector and the gallery owner, Cecily, "It's about pretending to be something you already are." The problem is the show could also be about falsity, or juxtaposition, or "the face and the body and the night," or any number of other things depending on the viewer. This difficulty with definition, and Sabine's oscillation between her sense of utter failure and artistic victory, tears at her as she flounders through the pre-opening publicity push wherein her main strategy is to livestream both the bizarre and banal of her everyday in an attempt to "coauthor a work with the public...to start a dialogue with the viewer...in real time." Throughout it all, Sabine's beleaguered husband, Constantine; her friend Ruth, whose whale-shaped cakes "occup[y] the intersection between baking and marine life"; and Cecily's partner, Freya, whose sculptures sell for thousands, attempt to soothe and bolster her ego, with little success. As Sabine's anxiety ramps up, she's visited by the apparition of feminist art icon Carolee Schneeman, offering protection against the insistent attentions of a stalker who peers in Sabine's windows with the muddied face of a Rembrandt self-portrait. The whirligig pace of the novel relentlessly intensifies from chapter to chapter as Sabine navigates the boundary between real and manufactured, all in front of a live audience. If Sabine mistakes art for life, or vice versa, the results could be deadly--both for her body of work and her actual body. The book is a pointedly absurdist send-up of the pretensions of the art world, which nevertheless carries at its core a real exploration of what is at stake when one lives for art. Baxter continues her triumphant exploration of real lives lived on the fringes of the surreal. Sassy, sharp, and very funny, but with a consequential heart.
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Starred review from November 1, 2024
Conceptual artist Sabine lives outside Melbourne with her chef husband Constantine. They are a deeply intense couple, their bond marked by passion, long hours, animal smells, and olives. Sabine's latest exhibit, a series of nocturnal, animalistic self-portraits and film titled "F*ck You, Help Me," is about to open at a prestigious gallery. Sabine furiously prepares, questioning every choice, promoting to her bloodthirsty TikTok followers, comparing herself to others, and disassociating heavily. All of this is interrupted by the appearance of a potentially violent stalker--someone is watching Sabine, leaving notes, and breaking glass. Constantine, naturally filled with concern, is unfortunately too busy with the restaurant-industrial complex to catch the stalker IRL. Sabine must fend off the threat herself, with the help of her creativity, her TikTok followers, and a helpful ghost. Like Sabine herself, Baxter's (New Animal, 2022) second novel is feral and fun to be around. It posits age-old questions about the role of art in society while maintaining the dramatic, playful pace of a horror movie. Sabine and Constantine's love, messy and pure, will be in readers' hearts forever. Baxter's humor and consciousness make Sabine, the most eccentric of free spirits, easy to root for and understand.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.