The Face of a Naked Lady: An Omaha Family Mystery [Hardcover]

Michael Rips (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2005

Nick Rips’s son had always known him as a conservative midwesterner, dedicated, affable, bland to the point of invisibility. Upon his father’s death, however, Michael Rips returned to his Omaha family home to discover a hidden portfolio of paintings — all done by his father, all of a naked black woman. So begins Michael Rips’s exquisitely humane second work of memoir, a gloriously funny yet deeply serious gem of a book that offers more than a little redemption in our cynical times.
Rips is a magical storyteller, with a keen eye for the absurd, even in a place like Omaha, which, like his father, is not what it first appears to be. His solid Republican father, he discovers, had been raised in one of Omaha’s most famous brothels, had insisted on hiring a collection of social misfits to work in his eyeglass factory, and had once showed up in his son’s high school principal’s office in pajamas. As Rips searches for the woman of the paintings, he meets, among others, an African American detective who swears by the clairvoyant powers of a Mind Machine, a homeless man with five million dollars in the bank, an underwear auctioneer, and a flying trapeze artist on her last sublime ride. Ultimately, Rips finds the woman, a father he never knew, and a profound sense that all around us the miraculous permeates the everyday.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Some time after his father died, Rips traveled with his wife to hometown Omaha to sort through the estate. In the basement of the family manse they found a hidden portfolio of paintings by his father, all featuring a naked black woman. Rips's search to identify this woman, and thereby to understand better his enigmatic father, a reticent, wealthy Republican, forms the frame of this finely wrought book, remarkable not only for its vivid storytelling and magical realist approach—a rarity in nonfiction—but for its intelligent and musical meshing of memoir and philosophy. The latter comes via the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas, a student of both Husserl and Heidegger and a concentration camp internee, who taught that we can know only mystery, but can learn even so. The memoir ambles along the time line of Rips's life, rooted in blood (his grandparents owned a brothel where his father was raised and to which Rips devotes many words) and in land (an Omaha that's a garden of weirdness), twisting up through his father's life and his own with a shower of remarkable stories (the dead man who fell through a ceiling; the optical worker with a prosthetic penis attached to his boot; the millionaire who lives on the street), intertwining with the present and Rips's pursuit of the woman in the paintings. Rips, bemused and appreciative, writes beautiful prose; his book's structure, too, is artful, a steadily surprising phantasmagorical bridge from mystery to mystery. This is a book readers won't forget. (Mar. 1)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

Going through his late father's effects, Rips discovered a series of nude paintings of a woman he'd never met. This memoir is ostensibly about his attempt to find her but devolves into a beautiful, if scattered, portrait of the rural Midwest where he grew up, a story full of extravagant personalities and adorned with occasional philosophical musings. Central to it all is the lingering presence of his father, an enigmatic figure who was reared in a brothel owned by his grandparents, and who tended to communicate with his son largely through analogies and metaphors. Gradually, the seemingly discrete anecdotes in Rips's book, like those told to him by his father, coalesce into something of moral significance. Of a late encounter with his father, he writes, "I considered, for the first time, the possibility that buried in his stories was a message for me."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (March 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618273522
• ISBN-13: 978-0618273522
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,376,889 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Rich in History, August 27, 2005

By 

pixiedust_001 (West Coast, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Face of a Naked Lady: An Omaha Family Mystery (Hardcover)

Though I generally dislike mystery's, I really enjoyed this book. This is and was a man's life, a real story was being told. What a great book. From the first page I was sucked in. Rips is a wonderful storyteller, knowing just the right amount of humor to throw in. Who knew that Omaha's history was so interesting. I felt that I was sitting i history class ( I love history) drinking up facts about Al Capone's ties to Omaha, brothels and slaughter houses. There were parts of the books that lagged a bit, but its still worth the read, Rips finally finds the naked woman and he finally knows the man that was his father.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Secrets of Omaha, July 18, 2005

By 

J. Mackin (cambridge, ma) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Face of a Naked Lady: An Omaha Family Mystery (Hardcover)

This little book is one that you can just plow right through and be a bit sad when it ends. The premise of the story is that Michael Rips finds paintings of a naked African American woman, all done by his late father many years before. The son sets off on a journey to find out who this young woman is and what her relationship was to his father. In the end, the story is less about Rips' search for this woman and more about a remembrance and reevaluation of who his father, and his entire family, was and how their lives reflected that of their home city in Nebraska.
Rips' discussion of his father's upbringing, at the notorious Miller Hotel in South Omaha, as well as his own wanderings and growing pains, paints an amazing picture of a town that most people, especially those of us on the East Coast, probably never would have imagined (or certainly not this reader).
Rips' writing also shows that tension that erupts when children grow up and realize that there are many layers to their parents and that they did exist before their children were born (how shocking!).
In the end, Rips gives the reader a snapshot of the life of a city, as well as the life a hard working, caring, if not demonstrative, man and the city that he lived in. It shows the passing of time and touches up the oblivion of childhood.
My only regrets for this book are that Rips does not really choose to examine his mother's life, or what her possible reaction is to these paintings. The other problem I had was that it was too short! I wanted more about Nick Rips life and the history of Omaha.
A very readable, very enjoyable book.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It Happened In Omaha, October 17, 2005

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Face of a Naked Lady: An Omaha Family Mystery (Hardcover)

An entertaining tall tale from the heartland. I didn't believe one thing in the book, which isn't good when you're supposedly writing non-fiction. A lot of the book takes place in the city where Rips Senior lived, Omaha, and at a second rate hotel, the Congress, populated by a gang of absurd down-and-outers a la Wim Wenders' Million Dollar Hotel. When Nick Rips dies, his son Michael finds some art photos of a black woman among his dad's papers. This book is his account of how he tried to find out the identity of this mystery woman. Ii involves a lot of white guilt.

It's hard to work up any interest in finding out what lies in the past of such a dud.

"My father had no interest his children and none in himself. The respect that other men sought among their peers, the standing that other men gained through philanthropic or religious involvement, was of no concern to him . . . He laughed, sang, and danced; for him life was an enjoyable, small place." His sentences are first rate, it's the content that disappoints. In a typical Rips anecdote, Michael recalls a neighbor girl, Claire, who walked into her brother's room when she heard him laughing and singing, "Ducks and geese and Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry, When I take you out in the surrey" and found her brother lying on the bed having sex with a live chicken, breaking its neck at the moment of orgasm to increase his pleasure. Does this ring true, that people in the modern era have chickens strutting around their house and that every time someone wants chicken, they kill one? Even in Omaha? It's sort of funny when the narrator whispers to a stuffy woman at dinner that "there's semen in the chicken," but not really so funny, it was funnier in PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT. Practically nothing in the book has even a touch of reality, or if so, it was better done by Philip Roth, Richard Brautigan, or Garcia Marquez.

And yet, if you're looking for a good piece of magical realism, one that makes Omaha gleam like the towers of Trebizond, this is probably the book for you. It says that the author lives in the Chelsea Hotel, where Bob Dylan wrote "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands." He has a bright future as a fabulist, but I don't actually trust him as far as I can choke my chicken.

The poet Weldon Kees is one of the secret inspirations for this book. The characters debate whether or not Weldon Kees committed suicide, as the police concluded, by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in 1955. Or is it possible that he sneaked back to Nebraska and was living there at the Congress Hotel perhaps?