The Petting Zoo
THE PETTING ZOO In 1978, Jim Carroll published “The Basketball Diaries,” his memoir of being a Carroll already was a bona fide poet and downtown art star. He lived with Patti
With the posthumous publication of The Petting Zoo, the novel he had been writing for nearly 20 years, we The story revolves around 38-year-old Billy Wolfram, a golden boy painter of the late ’80s New York art Wolfram’s crisis is so profound, he is first institutionalized, then takes up hermitage in his Chelsea loft, trying But maybe his impotence is not his fault? Maybe it’s “the jaded cultural atmosphere in which he lived, where The choice of a protagonist who is a “full-out virgin to drugs,” drinks little and is incapable of having sex, If The Petting Zoo does not succeed as a novel, as the archeology of the artist, it is fascinating. The real One does not know if Carroll would have published this book (it was edited and released just over a year — Nancy Rommelmann The text to Carroll’s poem “8 Fragments for Kurt Cobain” is at © 2010 OregonLive.com. All rights reserved. The original article can be found here .
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