LEE & ELAINE

Rower’s second, as dismal as its predecessor (Armed Response, 1995), trades the former’s West Coast trappings for the Hamptons as the artist/writer narrator tries desperately to turn the dead wives of rival painters William de Kooning and Jackson Pollock into posthumous friends—and straighten out her own life in the bargain. She’s just discovered, after 20 years of living with a man, that she herself is turned on by one of her butch students, and her first off-season sojourn on the upscale side of Long Island, ostensibly to write a book that she’d been working on for years, turns into a full-fledged affair when Iris clomps into her life. But that doesn’t stop her obsession with Elaine de Kooning and Lee Krasner, which translates into daily trips to the cemetery where they’re buried and endless ruminations on how to carry out her scheme. Unfortunately, the Iris thing barely survives the off-season, leaving only a desire for more lesbian loving and foggy notions about Lee and Elaine. Two years later, after she’s finally ditched her lover Jack by tricking him into moving back to his ailing mother in Brooklyn, the Hamptons beckon again, and this time her project involves interviewing as many of Elaine de Kooning’s and Lee Krasner’s friends as she can persuade to see her. With no romantic entanglements, there’s progress of a sort, but for all the success she has insinuating herself among the Hamptons elite, the longed-for hint of a real-life friendship having existed between her subjects never surfaces.

The upshot: She doesn’t have much of a story, and neither do we.