Order SINGLE STROKE SEVEN here
Sometime around 2009-10, we have become generation Facebook and started living a life on social media that weren't entirely ours. Little five to twenty seconds biopics of who we really are, if we were to present them at Sundance. Our reality has become too boring and intricate for us to bear, but it's not going away because of it. This reality is the subject of Lavinia Ludlow's novel Single Stroke Seven, a witty and idealistic manifesto of millenial culture that is refreshingly not cynical or judgmental in any way. I thought Single Stroke Seven was a quirky and charming novel although it sometimes read like a series of vignettes, so does that make ME a millenial? Probably.
Lilith is the drummer in a garage rock band that can't quite define its own sound. They're on a fast track to nowhere in a city where dozens of new and original bands are born every week and the pressures of adult life are catching up to them. Lilith certainly doesn't have anybody paying her bills for her, so she has to work in an office at a bottling factory, where she entertains a stormy relationship with the majority of her co-workers. The clock is ticking on Lilith and her bandmates, their garage rock thing is getting old to everybody and they still don't have their shit together. But if there isn't a future for the band, what kind of future is there?
Single Stroke Seven is a novel, but it's sometimes easy to forget when you're reading it. It's not a book that necessarily amounts to more than the sum of its parts, it feels disjointed and drifting at times. Not all the chapters are significantly contributing to the story and it's frustrating sometimes because the reading experience is not always cohesive. What Single Stroke Seven has for itself though is some great parts. It's a sneaky humorous novel that reminded me of the early Kevin Smith movies. Lavinia Ludlow is considerably more idealistic than Smith, though and her characters actually have dreams and ambitions. Call it a generational update on Smith's ideas.
It's very au goût du jour to trash millenials in art and media. Saying they are a generation of entitled brats at cocktail parties will get you a lot of high fives. Millenials want to change a world they have barely lived it, but have you tried to change it yourself? Lavinia Ludlow's Single Stroke Seven draws a portrait of a generation of dreamers, idealists facing a world that just doesn't want to hear what they have to say. Perhaps the sneakiest and most brilliant way Ludlow illustrates that issue is through Lilith's tragic, yet hilarious relationship to her mother, who repurposes everything she does or says into Academic research papers Millenials might be a dysfunctional generation, but the dysfunction in itself doesn't originate with them.
Don't let the DIY, hand-drawn cover of Single Stroke Seven scare you off. It's a punk thing, not a self-published low-on-funds decision. Lavinia Ludlow can write and while Single Stroke Seven is a little all over the place (not unlike the protagonist Lilith's life), but it's a novel with a sneaky, wicked sense of humor and a beating heart. Ludlow sheds a tough but fair and most important hopeful look on the crashing dreams and ambitions of Lilith and gives an assessment that is not, for once, choking in its own cynicism. What if we had it all wrong, guys? What if we were in the way of people wanting to give their life meaning and change the world they live in? Maybe we don't, but it's a fair question to ask.