Book Review: Lola Bensky by Lily Brett

The year is 1967, and young Lola Bensky has arrived in London to interview a series of famous rock stars for Australian magazine Rock-Out. The book opens with Lola and a very gentile Jimi Hendrix chatting about weight and hair curlers. It continues through a series of interviews with superstars like Mick Jagger, Twiggy, and Pete Townshend to name just a few.

There’s something rather compelling about Lola’s character. Perhaps it’s her wide-eyed innocence, which doesn't seem to diminish as she gets older, or her weight-obsessed introspection, or her Woody Allen-styled neurosis that later becomes a series of phobias. Or maybe it's just the way she openly becomes absorbed with the most domestic aspects of her famous subjects' lives. They clearly think so too. Jimi Hendrix invites her over to his place to see him in his hair curlers. Mick Jagger offers her a cup of tea and later phones her to invite her over to meet Paul McCartney. Janice Joplin confides in Lola that she was a fat, pimply misfit as a teenager, and reassures her that she’s nowhere near as big as Mama Cass.

The story is told in several parts, moving through key timeframes in Lola’s life. It begins in London with Lola at nineteen, then moves to New York the following year. The next section moves to Melbourne when Lola is married to "Mr Former Rock Star" and beginning to become seriously agoraphobic. Then we move forward in time to Lola at fifty-one, a successful author in New York with her second husband, "Mr Someone Else". The following chapter goes back in time to Lola’s 20th year at the Monterey International Pop Festival, and the book ends with Lola in the New York City of the present – at sixty-three years of age.

Though Brett is adamant that the books she calls fiction are indeed fictional, she has also admitted that Lola Bensky follows her ‘real life’ experiences pretty closely, from the protagonist's initials through to how she looks, and the interviews she conducted as a young journalist during the sixties. Reading the book you get the definite sensation that you’re experiencing a unique insight into rock stars like Hendrix, Cher, Mama Cass, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Pete Townsend and Mick Jagger.

Hendrix, Cher, Joplin, and Jagger come across very well indeed – presenting a warm, thoughtful, and surprisingly sane image through the pages of this book. Jim Morrison and Pete Townsend in particular come across as odious: unpleasant, immature, and twisted. Reading Lola’s responses to these people, and her own sense of herself as a young Jew, and of course, as is always the case in Brett’s book, her sense of what it means to be the child of Holocaust survivors, is fascinating. That these famous people also respond to Lola’s experiences as much as she responds to theirs, adds to the power of this story.

Article Author: Maggie Ball

Magdalena Ball runs The Compulsive Reader. She is the author of the novels Black Cow and Sleep Before Evening, the poetry books Repulsion Thrust and Quark Soup, a nonfiction book The Art of Assessment, and, in collaboration with Carolyn Howard-Johnson, …

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