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I Know What I’m Doing NewSouth Books The story concerns an English girl, just turning 20, who leaves a drab life in London and comes to New York. The unnamed girl speaks in her own person, and this almost conversational narrative is interrupted now and then by another, third-person voice which watches the action from a slightly different perspective. These two lines make an angle, as it were, in which the girl herself moves, like a chick between cupped hands. And the girl is, indeed, the contemporary chick, stripped down to the barest spiritual essentials.
Reviews “The problem of the complicated person willing himself into simplicity is the modern problem. The ‘I’ of the story is complicated because she is a young creature of our civilization, and therefore cannot define either her goals, her means, or her potential. So, instead of trying to open all her secret compartments, she floods them with the water of neutrality. What she likes about America is the possibility of being emotionally neutral: ‘I could sail beautifully through an evening, order myself a decent dinner, kid my escort a bit in the right way, laugh, see a movie or a play, and get back home hardly remembering the man’s name or a word he had spoken. It was very pleasant.’ “This is the chick scenario, the New Wave story line that plots the trajectory for so many who live now. ‘What a splendid arrangement of God or nature, she thought. There is nothing accidental or trivial about it, nothing banal or unesthetic. It’s the most sensible thing in the world.’ “This brief, terse novel feels like dry ice on the mind. Koning does what Truffaut’s films do . . . zero in on that quantum of transfixed energy which governs the beautiful, graceful immobility of the cool generation. “A bit of self-irony is needed,’ thinks the girl. ‘Who cares? Is it so important to be happy, or loving, or loved? To hell with me.’ This is human nature on its way to the inorganic, to what the physicists call entropy, the leveling off of all tension and desire. Koning’s heroine sits tight, as tensely quiet as someone in a house full of strange noises. She is the child of overkill—underlive.” Newsweek (1964)
Links Visit Hans Koning’s Web site at http://www.hanskoning.net/. Also by Hans Koning: The Affair
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