Fiction, Fiction Subjects

The Green Hour

Name: The Green Hour
Author: Frederic Tuten
ISBN: 9780393325331

by Frederic Tuten

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Overview

Set in Paris and New York, The Green Hour tells the story of Dominique, a brilliant art historian who has recently recovered from a bout with cancer. The novel follows Dominique from her college years to the present, unfolding a moving love story in which Dominique is torn between her passion for the idealistic and seductive Rex, who periodically disappears from her life, and her feelings for Eric, a wealthy American businessman deeply in love with her.

Woven into this romance is the equally gripping tale of Dominique's relationship with art and the cultural turmoils of our time. By portraying a character for whom love and idealism are lost, this novel hauntingly shows us the importance of pursuing both. A Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2002.

Synopsis

A powerful story that explores the modern dilemma of passion versus tranquillity.

Francine du Plessix Gray

An affecting novel that explores the nature of love and the relationship between art and life.

About the Author, Frederic Tuten

Frederic Tuten is the author of Tintin in the New World, The Green Hour, and Self Portraits, among other fiction. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Writing. He lives in New York City.

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Editorials

Francine du Plessix Gray

An affecting novel that explores the nature of love and the relationship between art and life.

Larry McMurtry

An engaging love story, quirky, cosmopolitan, full of upliftings and downturnings, hopes aroused and hopes defeated.

Steve Martin

I felt moved and involved&$151;and above all envious. I loved this novel and could not put it down.

Publishers Weekly

L'heure verte, the magic hour when Parisians go to cafes "to drown themselves in milky green absinthe," represents the exalted state of being that Dominique feels when she's with Rex, the idealistic, charming, magnetic redheaded seeker of truth she meets in college. Dominique, herself a redhead, is in many respects Rex's mirror image; she's brimming with intelligence and discernment, qualities that inspire her career as an art historian. Rex is brilliant, but he's also a manipulative and selfish womanizer and serial heartbreaker. Dominique adores him, helplessly, year after year, even as other, more caring and loving men, enter her life and exit when Rex periodically turns up after a long absence and claims their relationship is all that matters to him. Tuten's portrait of a woman who wastes her life on an ineradicable passion is no ordinary love story. A sophisticated, urbane writer, Tuten (Tintin in the New World) is interested in the relationship between art and life. The background here consists of lucid observations about painting, philosophy and literature (with clever glimpses of academic infighting), so that the novel, while a study of character, embraces art and culture as integral elements. Dominique's decision to switch her area of expertise from passionate Goya to cool, classic Poussin mirrors the downhill course of her emotional life. She truly exists only during her brief, fiery liaisons with Rex, in a relationship that's essentially only the cooling ashes of a dying flame. "Love had been her Death," she realizes, finally. Cleanly reasoned, pellucidly phrased, in some respects this novel is as "bloodless and cerebral" as Poussin's paintings, and yet as infused with emotion as Goya's. Yet its portrait of a modern woman's dilemma is, in the end, genuinely moving. (Oct.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.