A Portrait of the Artist as an Amazon Reviewer

If you were a new parent in 2006, you might have stumbled across a lengthy Amazon review of Gerber’s Tender Harvest Sweet Potato Baby Food entitled “Mmm-Mmm Good.” The review, which gives the product five stars, begins with a description of the puréed foodstuff (a “tantalizing blend of organic goodness” with a “soft, piquant flavor to the root vegetables”). It then veers into a brief vignette about the reviewer flinging food across the kitchen when he was a “wee laddie,” followed by a peculiar aside about “feeding an infant a tiny amount of dirt every day” as per “Native” practice. The three-hundred-and-twenty-five-word writeup concludes with an image of the reviewer’s “inner baby” gnawing on the label of the Gerber’s jar, likely leaving any potential customer with more questions than when they started. Is there really dirt in the baby food? Does the reviewer buy this product for himself? And what type of Amazon user compares the taste of mashed vegetables to a “twenties Irving Berlin standard”?

The account behind the review belonged to the avant-garde San Francisco writer Kevin Killian, who published over a million words on Amazon, across almost twenty-four hundred reviews, before his death, in 2019. The products he evaluated included DVDs of classic twentieth-century cinema, literary biographies, and experimental poetry collections—but also toiletries, Halloween costumes, and a chestnut tree. His reviews, usually five stars, are often exaggeratedly gushing, even melodramatic, but they are not mere parodies. Killian brings serious attention to bear on everything he reviews, and many of his recommendations are genuinely illuminating. (“They harvest the sap out of Norwegian, Swiss, and West German moss plants, to get that honey-colored sweetness into every drop of the conditioning detangler,” he writes of a now discontinued Aveda hair conditioner.) At his peak, Killian was writing multiple reviews a day, and was at one time ranked sixty-first on the Web site’s now discontinued Top Hundred reviewer list.

“Selected Amazon Reviews,” an expansive collection of Killian’s works on the site, scraped from Amazon’s servers, lightly edited, and arranged chronologically, proposes a synthesis of two Kevins—the radical littérateur and the conscientious consumer. With a blue cover and a simple tricolor stripe running below the author’s name, rendered in an elegant script, the book recalls the Library of America collection. In a black-and-white photograph at the top right-hand corner, Killian stares at the camera with wry eyes and a cocky grin, as if to let us in on a joke.

Killian grew up in Smithtown, N.Y., a mostly white, middle-class suburb tucked away in a pocket of Long Island’s North Shore. In his collected memoirs, “Fascination,” he writes about hitchhiking into the city as a teen-ager to sleep with older men. Later, he bumped around the queer scene in New York City, acting in pornographic movies, hanging out with Allen Ginsberg, briefly dating Arthur Russell.

In 1980, Killian moved to San Francisco and began attending weekly writing workshops run by the poet Robert Glück, at the Small Press Traffic Bookstore. He had been trying to write novels since he was a teen-ager, but so far had never been published—“so busy was I with alcohol, drugs, and indiscriminate sex, pleasure,” as he put it. In the workshops, he found his voice. The classes were free, but rigorous and intensive. Writers in the movement, which came to be known as New Narrative, were encouraged to work between genres, to experiment with literary form, to employ a confessional register, and to engage intellectually with critical theory. Killian earned a reputation for being funny and outré. Glück reflected that, for his former student, “pleasure and safety were opposites, and his work turned on the moment when our hero sees the broader perspective of someone who wants to damage him.”

It was also through the workshops that Killian, who was queer, met and fell in love with Dodie Bellamy, a queer novelist involved in the city’s feminist scene. Their union surprised many, but their relationship was, in a way, an expression of the New Narrative way of life: they were confounding all categories of genre and sexuality, even the queer ones. They married in 1985. Killian worked in administration at a janitorial firm, and they moved into an apartment together. The stability that followed allowed them time to focus on writing. Killian was being published. His poems were selected by John Ashbery to be anthologized in the 1988 volume of Best American Poetry. His first novel, “Shy,” came out a year later. He also wrote art criticism and short stories, and dozens of plays for the San Francisco Poets Theater.

This productive period was interrupted when, in 2003, Killian had a heart attack. His medication regimen destroyed his will to write. Initially, he was resigned to being an “ex-writer,” but as the drugs tapered off the urge to compose returned. Bellamy suggested that brief Amazon reviews might provide a gentle reëntry. Killian began tentatively, punching single words into the site’s review form. Within a couple of years, he was producing elaborate, protracted critiques, sometimes several times a day.

In Amazon’s first annual report, published in 1997, the customer-review section was defined as a feature that would encourage users “to return frequently to the site” and “promote loyalty and repeat purchases.” By the mid-two-thousands, as Killian was getting started, the review section had become a central feature of Amazon’s “online community,” broadly associated with the democratic promise of Web 2.0. It was here that an average consumer could become a respected, clear-eyed critic and “provide their fellow shoppers with helpful, honest, tell-it-like-it-is product information,” according to the Web site.

In his early writeups, Killian adopts, or perhaps apes, a tone of giddy consumerism. He enjoyed “The Grudge.” He’s lukewarm about “Meet the Fockers.” He is delighted about the “tangy winter pears,” the “relish and mustard,” and the “cunningly wrapped sausages” that come in a Picnic-Themed Gift Basket (five stars). The reviews soon become more experimental, pushing the user-generated review format beyond its utilitarian function.

Consider, for instance, his review of MacKenzies Smelling Salts, from December 31, 2013. “My Irish grandfather used to keep a bottle of MacKenzies smelling salts next to his desk,” Killian begins. “He was the principal at Bushwick High School (in Brooklyn, NY) in the 1930s and 1940s, before it became a dangerous place to live in, and way before Bushwick regained its current state of desirable area for new gentrification. . . .  At school, he would press the saturated cotton under the nostrils of poor girls who realized they were pregnant in health class, before he expelled them. Or when the policy of corporal punishment had allowed him rather too much paddling of the sophomore boys, he would apply smelling salts to their faces till they recovered from passing out.”

Killian then describes how, as a teen, he began sneaking sniffs of MacKenzies while raiding his grandparents’ medicine cabinet, as a thrill, but now, as a grown man, uses them to recover from grief or after a shock. When he was passed over for inclusion in the 2014 Whitney Biennial “by a troika of careless curators,” for example, Bellamy passed the MacKenzies under his nose “as though she were my grandfather ministering to those pregnant girls of yore.” Killian took one snort and was revived—“still grieving for my disappointment but at least able to function and go back to making my art, feeding the cats, etc., being a man.” All in all, a five-star product.

“When you read them, yeah, they’re reviews of a sort,” Killian said of his reviews. “But they also seem like novels. They’re poems. They’re essays about life.” One day, he is writing about Liz Kotz’s art-historical volume on the “turn toward language” in visual art in the nineteen-sixties. Then he is doing a close reading of Kristen Stewart’s hair in “Twilight.” Then a tape of “Viniyoga Therapy for the Low Back, Sacrum and Hips.” (“I wanted to get a good viniyoga tape ever since the early ’70s when, as a boy, I suffered a lower-back injury in France, when I was pushed out of a slowly moving bus by some schoolmates.”)

Such a frenetic montaging of subjects and forms was a signature of New Narrative writing. Chris Kraus’s “I Love Dick,” for instance, moved registers between memoir, fiction, and theory. Bellamy’s “The Letters of Mina Harker” was a pastiche epistolary novel written from the perspective of the main female character in Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” On Amazon, Killian stretched this blurring of boundaries to its limit. For him, almost anything for sale on the “everything store” came laden with cultural significance. A review of Advil, for example, begins with a glib joke about how delicious the pill’s cherry flavor is. If warnings didn’t preclude it, Killian “would be popping Advils all day just to get that delicious taste in my mouth, like a kid in a candy store.” But then he goes on to explain that he started taking the medicine after an industrial accident at work, when a box of paper stock tumbled onto his foot. The offhand review becomes an oblique yet insightful commentary about modern life: it sucks that your foot was crushed at work, but isn’t it nice having a cherry-flavored painkiller delivered to your door while you recuperate?

Such forays into autobiography are common throughout “Selected Amazon Reviews.” Killian posts all of his reviews under his real name, and his experience holds the disparate entries together. Often, an item will trigger a Proustian reverie. A bracelet charm of a smiling monkey, for instance, reminds Killian of a couple of treasured childhood amulets that he believed would protect him “from the evil spirits known to haunt my childhood home in Smithtown (Long Island)—but I was too bashful to wear them on a bracelet, fearing taunts from bullies, fearing being considered a ‘sissy.’ ”

The memoiristic impulse is central to Killian’s œuvre. Much of his writing details his early life in transgressive detail. Once, after a reading of the autobiographical vignette “Spurt,” in which Killian leaves a man who has a fetish for blood play bleeding out in the shower, an aggrieved woman in the audience approached him. “Did that really happen to you?” she asked. Kevin responded, “I know. I’m so ashamed and embarrassed about that.” She slapped him in the face.

Holding a New Narrative writer responsible for the behavior of a character in their work is dubious, though. Such authors are always, in their work, deconstructing stable ideas of the self. For Killian, “Kevin Killian” functions as a flexible motif, appearing sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes in disguise. In one story, Kevin Killian is a ghost haunting an estate in Smithtown. In another, Kevin Killian is a curmudgeonly old man living in rural New York with a pet chimpanzee named Chester who writes the novels attributed to Kevin Killian.

In “Selected Amazon Reviews,” Killian adds yet another Kevin to the list. This Kevin spends his evenings with his wife curled up on the couch with their two cats, Ted and Sylvia, watching Katharine Hepburn movies, or knitting, decorating cakes, and hanging pet-themed ornaments on the Christmas trees, as in his five-star 2007 review of Pet Pawprint Hanging DIY Keepsake Ornament.

But Kevin Killian in the review section was not the real Kevin Killian, at least not exactly. Did Killian have children, as he claimed in several reviews? No. Did he enjoy fine foods? No. (According to friends, he lived on a diet of only microwave meals and Tab.) Did he actually want to study airport management? Probably not. Did that twelve-color set of ballpoint pens really trigger a memory of attending school as an American boy in rural France, where his classmates had “beautiful pens that were almost family heirlooms?” No. The real Kevin Killian had never even visited France. He probably didn’t own that twelve-color set of pens, either. On Amazon, you can review a product without buying it.

It’s tempting to interpret Killian’s Amazonian doppelgänger as an ironic burlesque of the online shopper. In the mid-two-thousands, when Killian was at his most prolific as a reviewer, it was becoming clear that Amazon was contributing to the destruction of the type of creative life that he enjoyed. Was this his way of queering e-commerce, subverting the platform from within? Wayne Koestenbaum argues, in his foreword to the collection, that Killian’s reviews “Occupy Amazon” with “a radical-faerie insouciance. . . .  He enacts a cosmophagic critical practice, doing a Sontag but without the severity.”

But “Selected Amazon Reviews” is not just a conceptual art work, or a literary hoax. Killian’s reviews are brimming with genuine pleasure, and also a wonderment and ardor for the great variety of stuff on the Web site. His reviewing voice sometimes resembles Frank O’Hara’s revelry in the ordinary in the poem “Today.” (“Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful!”)

Killian, like so many of us on social media, seemed to love his platform of choice—the Amazon review section—despite its complicity in a techno-capitalist system that he abhorred. A similar ambiguity recurs throughout his stories and plays. As the writer Lonely Christopher observes, Killian’s early work is “replete with transactional sex with older men, but he always seemed to cherish what he got out of it, even if it was only the experience of being in or out of control.” The same is true with the Amazon project. The whole thing turns on the question of who is really using whom: the reviewer or the platform?

Most of the entries in this volume are written during the mid-two-thousands. Since then, Amazon’s review section has changed dramatically. Each product page now features an A.I.-generated summary of the existing customer reviews, smoothing out the heterogeneity of human taste into an algorithmic average. These interventions are in keeping with Amazon’s long-standing endeavor to erase the human labor that makes its almost two-trillion-dollar market value a reality. (The company’s crowdsourcing platform for on-demand work is called Mechanical Turk, after all.) When the product of our desire arrives at our doorstep, the thinking goes, it should feel like magic. We are not supposed to consider the people who made, packed, and delivered the sweet-potato baby food when writing the product review.

But Amazon is losing control of how A.I. is used on the site. The platform has long had an issue with knockoff or fraudulent product listings, and the review section worked as a check. Now scammers are flooding the Web site with A.I.-generated listings, and then using bots to generate favorable reviews to artificially boost them. What was once a trusted customer-feedback section is beginning to look like an ecosystem of computer-generated nonsense. “As an AI language model, I don’t have a body,” one recent review for a pair of maternity shorts reads. “But I understand the importance of comfortable clothing during pregnancy.”

Killian would likely have been delighted by the absurdity of such posts. Like him, the bots are performing an absurdist impersonation of the average online reviewer, and frustrating Amazon’s business model in the process. But he also knew that the form he had chosen to work in was an ephemeral one, and that the company on whose Web site he had left so much of himself would not hesitate to wipe “content” that did not contribute to its bottom line. “Selected Amazon Reviews” is insurance against the erasure that Killian courted. At more than six hundred and fifty pages, the book looks and feels like an archival document. What’s lost in this printed and bound volume is the risk and pleasure of the online encounter—of searching for baby food or ballpoint pens or a Kylie Minogue album, and finding Killian’s voice, palpably alive and joyfully haunting Amazon’s servers. ♦