She is magnificent.Īt the beginning and end of this work, she says (somewhat disingenuously) that it's an attempt to write about nothing, and indeed a lot of what's in here has the meandering immediacy of the journal entries on which it's clearly based. I finished M Train and immediately stuck Patti Smith's picture up over my desk, among a small number of other heroes of creative inspiration. It's a relief and a joy, then, to follow the wide-eyed, childlike wonder that Patti Smith, in her late sixties, still has for reading, in this melancholy, peripatetic masterpiece about creativity and loss. It's been quite some time now since the fascination and joy I get from books could be ascribed to youthful enthusiasm, but I still worry that I'll reach some older, wiser state from where I'll look back with a sense that I should have been doing something else with my free time.
I think often of a line I read once in an Orhan Pamuk novel: ‘Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow.’ That hurts so much that you feel there must be something to it. What's the point of reading books? Do they really help? Sometimes – compulsively turning pages to lift your mood – you have to wonder. It is a powerful, deeply moving book by one of the most remarkable multiplatform artists at work today. Here, too, are singular memories of Smith's life in Michigan and the irremediable loss of her husband, Fred Sonic Smith.īraiding despair with hope and consolation, illustrated with her signature Polaroids, M Train is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature, and coffee. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer's craft and on artistic creation. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, we travel to Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico to the fertile moon terrain of Iceland to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York's Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits to the West 4th Street subway station, filled with the sounds of the Velvet Underground after the death of Lou Reed and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima. M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook.
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