Overview
When Ann's childhood friend Hannah Wilke dies and is buried in Green River, the famous East Hampton cemetery which contains the graves of Abstract Expessionist painters Jackson Pollack, Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Frank O'Hara, and Stuart Davis, Ann seeks out the graveyard. She becomes obsessed with the graves of women artists, mostly wives of more famous men, and she imagines that Lee and Elaine get a second chance and come back as lesbians.
Such speculation is never innocent and the narrator finds that her own life is turned upside down as she falls in love with a woman student and abandons the security of her marital Soho loft. The invasive powers of fiction are brilliantly demonstrated in this wryly funny and mordant book about romance, life, death, and starting over.
A diehard New Yorker, Ann Rower is the author of If You're a Girl (Native Agents) and Armed Response (Serpent's Tail) which is her celebration of the death of her uncle Leo Robin, who wrote "Thanks for the Memory" and "Diamonds are A Girl's Best Friend" and many other songs. She is currently living in Bisbee, Arizona and thinking of teaching a course on "Writing on Horseback" at the local college.
Also Available by Ann Rower
Armed Response
TP $12.99, 1-85242-415-X • CUSA
Synopsis
Jackson Pollock—the wife's tale.
Publishers Weekly
In this second novel by Rower (Armed Response), the artistic and social excesses of the New York School painters Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning and Elaine de Kooning provide a welcome obsession for a painter in a midlife crisis. At the start of an East Hampton summer, the death of an old friend and fellow artist shocks the narrator and leads her to Green River Cemetery, where she comes upon the graves of many of the abstract expressionist painters, among them Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning. She begins to investigate the history of "the wives," convinced that there is a story there "about friendship and competition between women artists." As this interest stretches out over several years, it becomes more and more a way for the narrator to avoid her own failed career, her fears of aging and the disintegration of a 20-year relationship with her live-in boyfriend. The lesbianism with which she toyed as a girl resurfaces, and she embarks on a series of liaisons with younger women. Research on the book (entitled Lee and Elaine) takes up much of her time, but she is only interested in primary sources, the information she gathers is already well known and her surprise at the most mundane facts is improbable. Rower has nothing new to add about the relationship between Lee and Elaine save the fanciful supposition that they are ghosts "coming back as lesbians after all those years married to those macho art stars." The narrator, nameless throughout, remains a cipher. (Mar. 19) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.