Book of the week: Just Kids by Patti Smith

(Ecco, $27)

At 63, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Patti Smith worries that she hasn’t yet created anything of true greatness, said Vanessa Grigoriadis in New York. But the first book of prose from the woman who “married poetry to the punk movement” promises to be an instant “classic.” Just Kids is written in a simple, “shockingly beautiful” style, and the story itself is timeless. Essentially it’s a “romance about becoming an artist in the city”—in this case, the true tale of how a poetry-mad South Jersey girl and an aspiring painter named Robert Mapplethorpe met in 1967 New York, became lovers, and willed each other from obscurity and poverty to global acclaim.

“Although Just Kids is Smith’s tribute to Mapplethorpe, she’s the more arresting character of the pair,” said Laura Miller in Salon.com. At the time they met, Mapplethorpe was a middle-class Catholic kid not yet comfortable with his homosexuality. He would die of complications from AIDS in 1989 after a short career capped by a national controversy over his sexually explicit, homoerotic photographs. Smith had a more uncommon magnetic force. Skinny and pale, “a mercurial combination of ugliness and beauty,” she eventually would count playwright Sam Shepard and poet-musician Jim Carroll among her lovers, before marrying guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith. All seem to have been attracted by the “striking purity” of her persona. Even when surrounded by such bohemian luminaries as Gregory Corso, Bob Dylan, and Janis Joplin, Smith focused single-mindedly on their work rather than on their celebrity. Her memoir is moving because it is so “ferociously earnest.”

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Smith’s influence on music can’t be doubted, said Clive Davis in Vanity Fair. Those of us lucky enough to have seen her onstage at CBGB in 1975 know that no woman before her “combined poetry and performance in such a visceral way.” She’s “one of the few artists who really did create modern rock as we know it.” That makes the innocence of her early New York days all the more striking, said Raven Snook in Time Out New York. In a book “chock-full of amazing anecdotes” about such figures as Andy Warhol, Jimi Hendrix, and William Burroughs, it’s touching to find that the scene also depended on the likes of Mapplethorpe and Smith—two “incredibly creative and naïve geeks.”