It’s curiously refreshing to find a good book whose main character you despise. Such is the case with Ella Baxter’s Woo Woo. It’s evidence of Baxter’s talent that you stick with her self-obsessed and often mean-spirited protagonist, Sabine Rossi. At first, you just want Sabine to get her comeuppance. By the end of the book, less so.
Sabine is an artist, specifically a conceptual artist. The story follows her in the days before the opening of her gallery show, titled “Fuck You, Help Me.” It features puppets big enough for her to wear. She stages happenings with these objects that she photographs and livestreams for fans with social media handles like Pignut666 and KibbleJoy. People in her inner circle, from the gallery owner to her put-upon husband, Constantine, are not merely supportive but worshipful. But Sabine’s dramatics are nonsensical. Woo-woo just about describes her.
Consider that Sabine is mentored by the ghost of body artist Carolee Schneemann. Even more troubling, she thinks she’s being stalked by a personage she calls the Rembrandt Man because he reminds her of a portrait by the great Dutch master. A crafty writer, Baxter makes you wonder whether this man is real or not; though this reader concluded that he’s not, another reader may disagree. Whether he’s a genuine threat or another figment of her psychosis, Sabine nearly destroys her house fighting him off in one harrowing scene. She livestreams this too.
Woo Woo deftly sends up a subtype of conceptual art that is, as one critic writes of Sabine’s work, “contrived, boring, and egotistical.” It’s a world where people say things like “The tapestries of her internal and external diaspora are more evocative than your whale cakes,” with a straight face. One feels compassion for Sabine because she and her loved ones can’t see how ridiculous she is even as the rest of the world does. It matters that each chapter is headed with a quote or title of a work from artists as varied as Ovid, Chekhov, Cindy Sherman and Lana Del Ray. Art, even bad art, is essential. And so the Sabine Rossis of the world persist.