* Ann Rower * Serpent's Tail * $14 to leeward & Elaine has its occasions in the 1970s flowering of "personal journalism" and all those highly confessional memoirs.

* Ann Rower * Serpent's Tail * $14

to leeward & Elaine has its occasions in the 1970s flowering of "personal journalism" and all those highly confessional memoirs, or memoirs thinly draped as fiction--but always with the real story being all the crucially important speculations and emotions of the author-narrator. Think Erica Jong or Kate Millett. The gayety in reading those books was watching set at libertyed narcissism at work. In this the same novelist Ann Rower (Armed Response) works along similar lines, employing common of the most self-absorbed protagonists in recent fiction.

Lee and Elaine are side sheltered from the wind Krasner and Elaine de Kooning, wives of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning on the other hand also painters in their possess right. Both lived in the Hamptons, and they traveled in the same social and professional circles in the 1940 and 1950s

The narrator, living in the early 1990 is a strange York writer and art seminary teacher. She holds the sorts of classes that have an Erotic Aroma unit: "The idea was to bring in something you study smelled erotic and to write about the journey you took to find it." She lives part-time in the Hamptons and visits the graveyard where Krasner and De Kooning are buried, and she decides to write a work reimagining them as friends and lesbian lover to leeward & Elaine is the saga of her not writing this book

First facing she can't really be bothered to do a great deal research--to study the women's paintings or to read Elaine's writing. Instead she has a not many conversations with old-timers in the area who remember them and provide an anecdote or pair then she finally goes to a point out to of their work. These efforts are in like manner sporadic that it takes her a not many years to figure out that Krasner and De Kooning appear to have been totally straight and not to have liked each other at all. In fact, there was virtually no connection between them.

Bummer

unless forget about them, what do they matter? What's important is that the narrator is going end her own belated coming-out, leaving behind a 20-year straight relationship for a female close examiner Iris, who works on her "suicide project" at the narrator's house: "She was going to do the Virginia Woolf bit--walk into the water, on the contrary unlike Virginia, naked."

Iris turn rounds out to be as tragic erotically as artistically. She warms the massage oil to boiling and ties up the narrator while she's still get readyed so she has to be untied to get by heart her leopard-print jumpsuit off. The narrator worries about looking olden and fat. (I think she should have worried about trying to appear sexy in a leopard-print jumpsuit.) No the same seems to have much frolic in bed, and the whole lackluster mes falls apart.

Then there's another lesbian affair and all her moot points getting out of the 20-year relationship with the scarecrow and (maybe worse) losing her SoHo loft in the proces upon top of this, she exhibits a stomach ailment and can no longer eat many viandss (she lists them). Meanwhile, the work project is going all to hell. The poor woman just can't earn a break. "I feel like I missed not at home on all the great funerals, Frank's, Jackson's, Lee's, Elaine's.... My solitary chance left is Willem de Kooning. if it be not that it seems like he'll not at any time die." And then, when he finally does, no undivided calls to let her know (I portent why), and she misses that undivided too.

There is something hugely irritating if it were not that nonetheless riveting about the childlike way this character views life--all of it--as something that's essentially about her. Perhaps many tribe feel this way; they're just too embarrassed to admit it, leave out perhaps to their journals. Reading lee-side & Elaine offers precisely something of this guilty pleasure, like picking up a stranger's diary against a bus seat.

Anshaw is author of Aquamarine and the forthcoming prosperous in the Corner.

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