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Title: A Chance Meeting : Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967 by Rachel Cohen ISBN: 1-4000-6164-4 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 09 March, 2004 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.6 (5 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: William Dean Howells liked blueberry cake
Comment: A CHANCE MEETING, divided into into 36 short chapters, contains stories of the relationships between noted writers and artists from just before the Civil War to the late 1960s. Most of the chapters are framed around a single meeting, but contain digressions which sometimes encompass other famous figures.
What are we to make of this unique, celebratory, and quite often infuriating work? Each chapter is backed up by Rachel Cohen's source notes, detailing the basis for the events and behavior described. Yet, throughout the book there's a curiously speculative tone, Cohen describes many of her beloved figures as "maybe" doing or thinking this or that. In the opening chapter, Henry James (then a young boy) is described as feeling a "persistent uneasiness" while eating ice cream after having his portrait taken by Matthew Brady. Cohen notes this episode is invented, but then one must ask, "Why is this important?" Surely a book very much like this could have been written without such flights of fancy?
Indeed, several chapters fail to coalesce at all. In a chapter on Willa Cather and Sarah Orne Jewett, Cohen asserts that the fact Cather did NOT meet Henry James changed the artistic direction of her career. How can this be proven? In most of these vignettes, no direct suggestion is made of how the characters influenced each other. Cohen is edging away from history and criticism and dangerously close to short fiction here. The book picks up in the last third, with some gossipy stuff about Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop and a funny scene of Marianne Moore and Muhammad Ali together, but the whole thing is much too ephemeral. The photographer Richard Avedon provided several photos - he's thanked in the acknowledgements - but did he deserve to be included in the title of several chapters? It's not as if the people he photographed (Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, for example) hadn't met before.
A suggestion: read some of the books Cohen sites in her bibliography instead of A CHANCE MEETING.
Rating: 5
Summary: Comfort Reading
Comment: What an exhilierating experience! I savored these 36 essays over a few weeks, reading only a handful a night before I went to bed. The book is just beautiful; there is no other word to describe the writing, tone, and voice of Rachel Cohen's book.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Chance Meeting : Intertwined Lives of American Writers and
Comment: Cohen, who teaches in the Sarah Lawrence nonfiction M.F.A. program, won the 2003 PEN/Jerard Fund Award for emerging women nonfiction writers for the manuscript of this book. Entertaining and accessible, A Chance Meeting shows how the lives of various prominent figures (e.g., Alfred Stieglitz and Hart Crane, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore and Norman Mailer) have intertwined to produce some distinctly American forms of expression. Considering the years between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, Cohen evokes the relationships of some 30 writers and artists, focusing on those moments in their lives when they became aware of what it meant to be American (as when a young Henry James posed for Civil War photographer Mathew Brady in his studio). Cohen begins and ends each chapter with fictionalized re-creations of the meetings and then fills in the accounts with facts gleaned from her extensive research and quotes from correspondence and other sources. The fictionalization of these encounters will put off some academics, as will the lack of detailed references. There is an impressive bibliography, but the chapter notes at the end of the book refer to the sources only generally. In the end, alas, the book seems too popular for the academic market and too academic for the popular market. An optional purchase for academic libraries or public libraries with strong literature collections.
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Title: Living to Tell the Tale by GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ, EDITH GROSSMAN ISBN: 1400041341 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 04 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: The Known World by Edward P. Jones ISBN: 0060557540 Publisher: Amistad Press Pub. Date: 14 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Early Stories : 1953-1975 by JOHN UPDIKE ISBN: 1400040728 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 21 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: The Great Fire: A Novel by Shirley Hazzard ISBN: 0374166447 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 14 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: L'Affaire by Diane Johnson ISBN: 052594740X Publisher: E P Dutton Pub. Date: 25 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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