Just Kids comes with numerous plaudits from the great and the good (Johnny Depp, Joan Didion), and has apparently won the coveted National Book Award—something that even Vladimir Nabokov never achieved. Having read it cover-to-cover in a couple of days, I’mstill waiting to be wowed. Patti Smith’s style aims for poetical economy, interspersed with the occasional grand gesture (lyrical non sequiturs plonked between paragraphs), but for this reviewer reads as precious (and humourless) self-aggrandisement. Just Kids is full of swooningly self-important pronouncements about The Life of The Artist, interwoven between longish checklists of famous names from the late 60s/early 70s music/art scene. The latter, clearly intended to illustrate the creative powderkeg of the New York milieu at the time, often prove self-defeatingly banal; witness Patti’s moving two-minute chat with Jimi Hendrix on a staircase, for instance, or her brush with Salvador Dalì in the lobby of the Hotel Chelsea (where she is standing, oh-so-casually, holding a stuffed crow—presumably hoping for someone to notice her impromptu genius).

The memoir takes, as its subject, Patti’s relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, from their first meeting as penniless artists in the late 1960s to his eventual AIDS-related death in 1989,but is only fitfully successful at conveying their creative and sexual symbiosis; it’s at its best when conveying her growing dismay over his dark fascination with the New York gay scene, through which his own latent homosexuality would eventually emerge. Smith is also on good form describing the abject living conditions they were often obliged to endure, though one suspects at times the pair craved such “deprivations” to cement their self-image as self-proclaimed Geniuses; romantic squalor is taken as read to be the crucible in which Great Art is forged. Too often the book strays into the realm of self-parody: I lost count of how many “significant” events “significantly” took place on the birthdates, or deathdates, of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, for example. (The reader must bite back a disbelieving giggle, too, at Mapplethorpe’s Damascene conversion to the art of photography: sifting through a collection of Victorian snaps, he gasps in wonderment: “It’s all about light and shadow.” Um, well, yes.)

Throughout the book are black-and-white snapshots (mostly by Mapplethorpe) of one or both of the pair, striking a pose for the camera. And in each and every one, Patti Smith wears the same dour, pissed-off, utterly joyless expression that tells the reader, in no uncertain terms, that she is Seriously Hard Work. Never once does she suggest the remotest chink in her armour, that might lead one to suspect any hint of human empathy. By the end of the book, she emerges as cold, distant, and utterly self-absorbed. Even after Mapplethorpe has died, she seems more concerned with creating a picturesque image of her own glorious misery—going for a solitary walk on a windswept beach in a long dark coat, if you please. Just Kids isn’t actually terrible, but nor is it the touching masterpiece Messrs Depp and Didion would have you believe; for an account of the New York music/art scene of the late Sixties/early Seventies, almost anything by Victor Bockris will serve you better.