Little Fugue: A Novel [Hardcover]

Robert Anderson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 28, 2004

Acclaimed short-story writer and winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award, Robert Anderson has written a brilliantly inventive first novel–a book that blends the facts of a famous writer’s life with the profound effect of her death on an entire generation.

Sylvia Plath’s legacy inspires, harrows, and haunts the three people at the center of Little Fugue: her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, freed by her death and then imprisoned by her myth; Assia Gutmann Wevill, Plath’s rival and Hughes’s mistress, who kills herself only six years after Plath; and Robert Anderson, a young New York writer, who is obsessed with Plath’s poems and her suicide, which “forged my identity and, incidentally, ruined my life.”

Their lives intersect, transiently and directly, through some of the more dramatic social upheavals of the past decades: the ’68 student riots, the drug-addled seventies, the AIDS crisis of the eighties, the cataclysm of 9/11.

Little Fugue crackles with wit and verbal dexterity. There have been many accounts of the Plath/Hughes drama, but author Robert Anderson provides a fresh, utterly convincing interpretation of events. This is a brilliant novel of artists caught between the erotic allure of extinction and the eternal power of poetry.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. The Plath/Hughes story has been told and retold almost to death, but Flannery O'Connor Award–winner Anderson (The Ice Age) breathes brash new life into the iconic tale in this hypnotic and provocative novel. Anderson chronicles the aftermath of Plath's 1963 suicide from the perspective of real and fictional characters, notably Columbia-educated fiction writer Robert Anderson, who is forever changed by reading the Ariel poems. To him, Plath is untouchable, the sacrificial Joan of Arc. His Plath-infused account of social and political turmoil in New York from the Columbia riots of 1968 to September 11, 2001, is counterpointed by the story of Ted Hughes and his mistress, Assia Gutmann Wevill. Although Anderson makes it keenly obvious that he favors Plath, and he will ruffle plenty of feathers with his blunt partisanship ("What a bleak, anticlimactic, eschatological PR caper that Birthday Letters charade made for.... Ted made his last buck"), Ted is artfully portrayed as a man who felt he never really knew his wife. Assia, meanwhile, is the half-good poet who covets Plath's identity and ends up sharing her fate. Anderson's writing is electric, irreverent and erudite. The novel's only flaw is the erratic fugue between the masterful Plath/Assia/Ted passages and the sometimes convoluted Robert sections; Robert as character is occasionally subsumed by the character of New York, and the fundamental connection between Plath and her young acolyte is lost. Still, this is a fiercely imaginative effort, in which Anderson connects the intricate psychology of his characters with their art and the world around them.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Despite his talent, British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes could never escape the shadow cast by his first wife, Sylvia Plath. A gifted poet and writer, Plath committed suicide at the age of 30, a month after the publication of her critically acclaimed novel, The Bell Jar. "She knew that was the one thing I wouldn't get over," Hughes tells Assia, his mistress at the time of his wife's demise. "She knew that all poets are in love with death." Award-winning short story writer Anderson blends past and present and fiction and fact in this astute debut named for one of Plath's well-known poems. At the novel's haunted heart is aspiring New York writer Robert, a teenager at the time of Plath's death, whose life is forever changed when a high-school teacher hands him a copy of her collection Ariel. Robert's preoccupation with Plath continues into adulthood, as he witnesses the madness of the world she left behind: the 1968 Columbia University riots; the AIDS epidemic; September 11, 2001. Drizzled with dark humor, Little Fugue is an eerie examination of lives defined by death. Allison Block
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books (December 28, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345454103
• ISBN-13: 978-0345454102
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,930,586 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Death is not a rebellion. Death is an orthodoxy.", January 24, 2005

By 

M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Little Fugue: A Novel (Hardcover)

Readers who are familiar with the Gwyneth Paltrow film, Silvia will probably find a lot to admire in this poetic, original and totally sprawling novel by Robert Anderson. The book basically takes up where the film left off - both including the scenes where Silva finally decides to gas herself, but this book goes much further than the film, portraying the troubles and disparate lives of the people that Silvia has left behind. Little Fugue is told from the point of view of Silvia's husband Ted Hughes, his mistress Assia Wevill, and a narrator named Robert, who is looking at the death of Plath from the perspective of his own life experiences in America.

Silvia waits anxiously for Ted to return. She knows that he's a womanizer and she also knows that he's probably gone off to see his mistress, but it isn't until later in the novel when Silvia's voice is no longer that we finally meet Assia, and witness the narrative unfold from her point of view. Through both Ted, Silvia, and Assia the reader witnesses short snippets of their lives: We are brought into the heart of Sylvia's tragic desperation, of Ted's flailing self-absorption, of Assia's ultimately heartrending need, and her frantic efforts to make Ted feel better at Silvia's wake - to be the woman to him that she thinks he needs. Ted and Assia stumble through blackness days and years after Sylvia's death, with Ted struggling to come to terms with how little he knew of his wife and Assia jealously forging Sylvia's identity.

Interspersed with Ted and Assia's story are Robert's experiences growing up in the sixties and seventies. He went to a New York City parochial school in 1962, and witnessed the 1968 riots on the Columbia campus, and a massive power failure in 1969. He also experiences the drug-ridden, counter-culture of New York in the 1970s and the AIDS epidemic of the '80s. Robert freely admits to his obsession with the poetry of Sylvia Plath, and to his extreme dislike for Ted, and his musings feel like an extended coming-of-age story that at times doesn't quite fit in.

While the stories of the trio are linked by both tragedy and ambition, Robert continues to struggle with Ted and Silvia's impact on his life through the tumultuous events of Sept. 11.

Herein lies the problem with the novel: Robert's narration, although interesting, sometimes seems like its from a separate novel, and at times his musings bare little or no resemblance to the lives of Silvia, Ted or Assia. There's also a problem with Anderson's style, which at times reads with such self-importance and literary clutter that it rapidly becomes tiresome and exasperating. The author often seems more concerned with the impressing the reader with his storybook dexterity, rather than writing a tightly plotted and entertaining narrative.

The novel, however, does have some beautifully lyrical moments and the assembly of distinct voices and themes play off each other and then come together to a harmonious finale. The events portrayed in the sections describing Sylvia, Ted and Assia are well grounded in fact and have a sense of quiet desperation that is both emotional and metaphysical in nature. Savvy Plath readers will have fun picking up the subtle references to her final collection, Ariel, but readers unfamiliar with Plath's work may find Little Fugue rather heavy going and somewhat maudlin. Mike Leonard January 05.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My new favorite contemporary author, June 1, 2006

By 

Judith M. Davidson (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Little Fugue: A Novel (Paperback)

I got this book out of the library in March and I have been reading and rereading it up until today when I finally have to return it....but I'm buying my own copy here and now. I don't really care about Sylvia or Ted, but Anderson can write rings around most others: an authentic voice, vocabulary that makes my dictionary a necessity (like Thomas Wolfe's "Of Time and the River") but not in a pedantic way. You can fall in love with the English language again here, because it is in the hands of a master. Descriptions so well-crafted.

This haunting, intricate novel captures the times, places, and people in a startling new perspective, and I lived through the 60's by the way.

3 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It was ok. I read it at Borders..., December 30, 2004

By 

tree turtle - See all my reviews

This review is from: Little Fugue: A Novel (Hardcover)

You know, writers just wanna be heard, okay? This guy, Robert Anderson, needed a subject... Now why in the hell it was Plath and Hughes is beyond me because the tale has been beaten to death. But, obviously, it has been difficult for Robert in NYC (before his first book won that kick ass award) and he needed a subject that could land him good press. Now me: I could never pimp myself out and write about Plath and Hughes to get NY Times-grade press. That's why I'm reviewing his book on amazon at 5 AM instead of shooting my own wad into the literary world. So, leave Robert Anderson alone and let him do his thang. By the way, I really am over the age of 13.

PS: The actual prose is less indicative of the intricacy of that essentially musicological structural device of the fugue and more indicative of hyperbole and histrionics. But, I'm giving the book 5 stars to compensate for the 1 that the other wronged reviewer below gave RA.