GENERATION LOSS

author:
ELIZABETH HAND

Fiction
300 pages
Harvest Books

Cass Neary had her fifteen minutes of fame in the underground art scene of New York City in the seventies, photographing the dead and dying for a book that became notorious. But thirty years have passed, and Cass lives a marginalized life; abused and abusing, she is a damaged person who can no longer create the art that enlivens her. When she is asked to travel to an isolated island in Maine to interview a famous, reclusive photographer, Cass jumps at the chance to meet her idol, another broken woman whose demons and alcoholism have halted her creative life. But once on remote Paswegas Island, Cass uncovers a deep undercurrent of mistrust and mysteries surrounded by vanishing people and the human refuse from an old, failed commune.

The characters in Generation Loss—a term referring to irretrievable damage done by repeated printing of a photograph—are deeply flawed and disturbed to the point that it’s difficult to feel sympathy for them, but Hand forms her characters carefully; it’s not easy to empathize with them, but we are given glimpses of each one’s potential, whether lost or yet to be regained. Hand makes stunning if stark work out of each character’s strained and multi-faceted soul.

Hand crafts more than a murder mystery; she creates a story centered on various characters and their need to create to be alive. And, on a deeper level, Hand grapples with the notion of what constitutes art: when Cass watches a woman die through her camera lens, taking images instead of helping, it doesn’t occur to her that this is abnormal. She is creating. Even the culprit, eventually and dutifully captured in an intense, chilling, atmospheric scene, subscribes to a twisted ethos of death as creativity.

In a world where progressively violent and near sociopathic exhibitions are sometimes displayed in galleries and museums, the chill one gets from Cass watching a woman die for her art is more than just fiction; one may wonder how long it will be before fiction becomes fact and is christened “art.”

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