“Being an artist is about selling stories, and selling stories is commerce. There is nothing alternative about it.” This is one of many interesting observations about the art world in Calla Henkel’s debut novel, Other People’s Clothes, which looks at the lengths some artists will go in the name of their work.
How society sensationalises the lives (and deaths) of women is a central focus, but ironically the novel itself is in danger of doing what it warns against. Ostensibly a story about a pair of American art students on a year’s Erasmus study in Berlin, there is a queasy blend of realist detail and pulp fiction that threatens to undermine the book.
But first, the positives. The novel lives up to its billing as a dark, compelling story about two girls whose lives are derailed after renting an apartment in Berlin from an eccentric crime writer. Zoe, the book’s narrator, is initially thrilled when she and her friend Hailey land a grand old apartment for low rent. The girls spend their time settling into classes, making new friends, trying to get warm in the freezing building, partying at night.
Henkel paints an unforgettable picture of the city through the eyes of an impressionable exchange student – failed attempts to get into Berghain, an introduction to Berlin’s sex clubs, the drug culture where “every sweaty body was a tropical island, everyone existing in their own libertarian state of bliss”.
The descriptions feel real and grounded in experience: “Most people in Berlin don’t actually get dressed up, they simply have a plastic or leather version of the black outfits they wear all week.” The wider backdrop of the city comes through in deft strokes, from the Holocaust Memorial – “ ‘It’s supposed to disorient you,’ Viola said, ‘and the greyness of the slabs represents the loss of identity’ ” – to the Berliner Zimmer characteristic of upper-class homes in the late 19th century, which is cleverly worked into the plot.
Hedonistic nightlife
Henkel is an American writer, playwright, director and artist living in Berlin. She has staged plays at Volksbühne Berlin and the Whitney Museum of Art, as well as at New Theater, the experimental theatre space she co-founded and programmed for a number of years. Her art writing has been published in Texte zur Kunst, Spike and Mousse. The film and television rights to this novel were recently bought after an eight-way auction. It is easy to see why – the hedonistic nightlife of Berlin combined with an art world full of pretension, jealousy and underhand dealings. Other contemporary novels that come to mind include Barbara Bourland's twisty whodunnit Fake Like Me and Rachel B Glaser's Paulina & Fran.
Other People’s Clothes holds its own against these books when highlighting the biases and inequalities of the art world. A student at an elitist college in New York, Zoe has experienced prejudice both as a female artist – “The easiest way to dismiss a female’s work was by calling it domestic. Or decorative” – and for majoring in collage. Maligned by other students, to her, “It was the collages that mattered, they were intense, alienating, vibrating with violence – eyes floating, faces chopped, dragonfly wings emerging from mechanical gears.”
In Berlin, she and Hailey struggle to be accepted by the art crowd and ultimately decide to throw their own parties, messy, flamboyant affairs that are part performance art, part revenge on their landlord Beatrice who they suspect may be spying on them.
The flaws
This is unfortunately where the book begins to break down. There are time-looping, labyrinthine subplots that include Beatrice's history as a crime writer and her relationship with her mother; Zoe's murdered best friend back home; and Hailey's obsession with celebrity and with real-life murder stories, specifically the Meredith Kercher and Amanda Knox case. There are numerous references to the latter: "'I mean we could do an Amanda Knox crime scene-themed night' … 'Foxy Knoxy is probably the only other exchange student who will be as famous as us.' " As spoken by the vapid and fame-hungry Hailey, these references are meant to be ironic, but cumulatively the mentions feel unearned, tokenistic and therefore exploitative.
It is a problem elsewhere in the book. With all the busy subplots, too many things lack depth – Zoe’s bulimia, her friend’s murder, her relationship with ex-boyfriend Jesse, her emerging bisexuality. And that’s before we even get to Hailey’s diary, or the novel she has apparently been writing in her spare time in between all the partying. Even the book’s framework, which sees Zoe tell her story to a psychiatrist, is largely dispensed with until the final, tumultuous end.
Henkel has smart things to say on narrative ownership and perspective, and how ultimately we are all just minor bit parts in other people’s dramas. It is these insights that remain in the memory when the lights go down on the rest of the theatrics.
