SOURCE: "Darkness on the Edge of the Text," in Times Literary Supplement, May 19-25, 1989, p. 536.

In the following review, Kaveney assesses Young Lust.

It is impossible to read in a way that is not implicitly political; but the methods of Kathy Acker's fictions aim to make possible radical readings, avoiding the closed and the directive, the authoritarian gestures that would seem paradoxical in texts that celebrate the aspiration to freedom and variety. The novellas included in Young Lust are early work; in them Acker feints at a number of styles without definitely opting for any one. Kathy Goes to Haiti is both an exercise in genre pornography and a deconstructive parody of it, in which the sheer tedium of a life lived for sexual gratification alone is spelled out in some detail—though the story itself does not ever quite become boring; it is also an exercise in...