An in-depth, highly personal portrait of a remarkable talent.
Coates’ debut biographical novel chronicles the life of modernist painter Agnes Lawrence Pelton (1881-1961).
The story begins with Agnes as a child in Germany, where she was born to American parents; both had fled tragedies and scandals in their respective families. She’s a sickly child, and her parents eventually return to Brooklyn, New York, where her mother opens a music school. As a teenager, Agnes studies art at the Pratt Institute, which leads to a job teaching art in Massachusetts. Later, she spends an exhilarating year in Italy, studying under former Pratt instructor Hamilton Easter Field. She’s asked to exhibit her work in the famed Armory Show of 1913 when another mentor sees her work at Field’s gallery. After exhibiting alongside Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, Agnes finds herself at the center of the art world, and she rents a studio in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Along for the ride are her wealthy friends and patrons, including Mabel Dodge, who invites her to visit Taos, New Mexico. Later, she lives in a windmill in the Hamptons, painting portraits for wealthy families, but she finds it unsatisfying. A trip to Hawaii rekindles Agnes’ desire for spiritual growth, and when a friend invites her to live in a California artists’ commune, she jumps at the chance: “I knew that something was being born inside me, and without having to think about it, I knew what colors I would use.” Coates’ thoroughly researched novel, told from Agnes’ first-person point of view, succeeds beautifully at re-creating the emotional life of this once-obscure artist whose legacy has lately become the subject of renewed interest. The characters are resolute and unshakeable, from Agnes’ stalwart mother to wealthy women who host political radicals and artists in their Fifth Avenue apartments. Coates draws Agnes’ character with care, depicting her as longing for success and acceptance in the art world but also craving solitude. The author also describes the artist’s unique spiritual journey and the inspiration for her later, abstract works in vivid prose that’s worthy of the artist.
An in-depth, highly personal portrait of a remarkable talent.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-687-9
Page Count: 328
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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