From Publishers Weekly
Lippincott's touching, delicately constructed second novel (after Mr. Dalloway) poses two questions, one stated how to live? and one implied what is the role of art? In 1928, Lark Marin and Nora Hartley set out together to find a better life. Freshly divorced, Nora means to escape Boston and raise her two children in a more natural setting, while Lark, who is gay, is fleeing three years in Manhattan and a series of bad relationships. With her divorce settlement and his inheritance from an uncle, Nora and Lark purchase "a fine Victorian more or less in good shape" in Truro, a rural town at the end of Cape Cod, and call it True House. They fill its rooms with like-minded friends, both gay and straight among them two painters, a gardener and a man simply seeking his art form. During the 15 years the novel spans, these friends grow close, pine for each other, fall in and out of love while raising children, losing parents and even losing some of their own members. But what's important about life at True House is not necessarily birth and death, but art: painting, gardening and finding the Muse in between. Indeed, Lippincott seems most interested in depicting a bohemian community that reveres, and is united by, art. Appropriately for an author influenced by Virginia Woolf, he has written less a straightforward narrative than a montage of short scenes, journal entries, postcards, letters, excerpts from travel guides and poems. Some unsentimental readers may find such a meditation on art and the good but rustic life too precious. But those interested in a utopian perspective and a celebration of the consolations of friendship should find this supple, graceful novel deeply satisfying. Author tour. (June)
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Fans of Lippincott's previous novel,
Mr. Dalloway (1999), will be eager to read his latest one, which is as experimental as its predecessor. The story traces the lives of six adults and two children who share a house on Cape Cod, near Provincetown, between 1928 and 1943. They are artists, art lovers, and outcasts (by divorce, sexual orientation, or, in one case, because of an interracial relationship). The novel is risky in terms of the author's refusal to construct a traditional plot, and the result is alternately fascinating and maddening. The house gets painted, an infant dies, people picnic at the beach, a central character is murdered, and so on. The novel is partially a Woolfian response to accepted novel forms, but the elegant distance from which Lippincott narrates it may alienate some readers. The effect is like observing a series of lovely, staged portraits of a community, rendered over time and in changing light; and, for the most part, the artist asks readers to draw their own conclusions.
James KliseCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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