Kirkus Reviews QR Code
I AM NOT JACKSON POLLOCK by John Haskell Kirkus Star

I AM NOT JACKSON POLLOCK

Stories

by John Haskell

Pub Date: April 1st, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-17399-0
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Nine intriguing debut pieces explore the point where art and life intersect—or collide—in the lives of artists, performers and movie characters.

While “Dream of a Clean Slate” examines Jackson Pollock’s last affair, it mainly contemplates how the painter’s unhappiness and frustration fed his art even as they destroyed him. The story asks, who is more authentic, the artist as person or the person as artist? “Elephant Feelings” juxtaposes a show elephant on Coney Island with a South African woman who was a freak-show attraction in France. According to Haskell, both loved and were discarded by the men who controlled their lives. Less fortunate than Pollock, they had no outlet for communicating their feelings and died broken-hearted. In “The Judgement of Psycho,” the Hitchcock movie is re-envisioned along with the role of Paris in the Trojan War. Haskell’s interest is the power of unattainable desire. “Crimes at Midnight” plays several riffs on Orson Welles films (including a walk-on by Janet Leigh) and on Welles himself as actor/character/creative force. These stories tend to be written in short segments, often seemingly unrelated. “The Faces of Joan of Arc,” for example, jumps from a discussion of Mercedes McCambridge as the devil in The Exorcist to a silent-screen version of Joan of Arc, to Hedy Lamarr as Delilah, to Godard’s wife (Anna Karenina) in a film persona as a prostitute. For Haskell, actors and their parts are seemingly interchangeable. “Capucine”—about the actress’s suicide–is one of the more unified stories, as is “Glenn Gould in Six Parts,” which also stands out for its few almost happy moments. “Good World” takes its cue from Aristotle’s pronouncement about habit as the foundation of virtue as it imagines the short life of the first Soviet dog in space and Richard III’s courtship of Anne. “The Narrow Road” shows the poets Basho and John Keats forced to choose between art and life.

Intellectually dazzling, emotionally chilly, and bound to provoke.