Customer Reviews

Our Arcadia

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Our Arcadia seeks the answer to what may be THE essential question: "How to live?" Nora, a divorced single mother of two young children, and Lark, a single gay man, meet over a Mary Cassett painting at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Nora is ready to end her career as a college English professor and Lark has come into a small inheritance. They decide to buy a house together in Truro, just outside Provincetown, Massachusetts. The year is 1928.

Nora and Lark call their new home, "True House," and soon add four more roommates of various backgrounds--all artists in their own right: Hortense, a "large, compact woman (35ish) who "wants to be to painting what Gertrude Stein is to writing;" Molly Harrison, a young aspiring artist, along with her new lover, the quiet black gardener, Davis; and, lastly, Leo, "a tall, round young man with a shaved head" and "round face." A seventh adult, Austin, is in and out of the house as Lark's lover.

The various stories of True House, or Our Arcadia, proceed chronologically past 1941. While the narratives are never far from the question of how to live, it is the relationship between Lark and Nora that drives the engine of desire in this brilliant novel by Robin Lippincott.

Many of the small chapters in Our Arcadia can be considered prose poems (note the title subtext: "An American Watercolor"). For those interested specifically in literary fiction, or for creative writing students, Our Arcadia should be considered the highest example of the form and Robin Lippincott an equal in the company of E.M. Forster or Virginia Woolf. A bravo work!!

I thoroughly enjoyed Lippincott's last novel, "Mr Dalloway", and I was eager to read his new one, but I don't know why I waited so long. "Our Arcadia" is a gorgeous story of a group of friends who create a haven on Cape Cod in order to pursue art in all its many forms (painting, architecture, living, sculpture, writing, loving). In 1928, Lark (a gay man) and Nora (a divorced mother of two) buy a house in Truro on Cape Cod, and seek to people it with fellow artists. The novel follows the next fifteen years as life takes many paths for each of True House's denizens. Taking elements of Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster (among others), and injecting a wholly American element, Lippincott created a cohesive piece that inspires and challenges standard storytelling. Like Carole Maso's works, "Our Arcadia" seeks to make a new path of literature, and does so with a graceful, feminine beauty. Without a doubt, this is one of the best books of 2001.

Lark, Nora, Hortense, Molly, Davis, Leo, Austin, Schuyler, Emily, and little Will - friends who join together and create their own family to live in "True House" - a large Victorian located on Cape Cod. What a delight!!! Fresh, original, delicately and elegantly written, and richly satisfying.

Our Arcadia beautifully depicts a search for community, family, connection. Lark and Nora, a young gay man and a divorcee with two young children, are united in their love for the arts. Together they search for a better way to live, creating "True House" - a home for a community of unique individuals who seek connection. Those readers who are in search of something different and thought provoking will be enchanted with the characters, ideas, and masterful writing of Robin Lippincott's Our Arcadia.

This book, as the title implies, is a masterful work of brushstokes only with words. The beauty of this story carried me into a realm of daydreams. How, I too, would love to find my Arcadia. Its simple story, its characters are all woven onto a canvas with pages. I reccommend this book for the simple pleasure of maybe helping someone "learn how to live".

This is an incredible piece of literature that does not allow standard structure forms to dictate its narrative. No, this is a beautifully detailed novel in which the reader comes to care for the characters in a series of vignettes and scenes that span a lifetime. We are inside the characters' minds and hearts from the start, feeling what they feel and for that Mr. Lippincott should be applauded. Like his wonderful first novel, MRS. DALLOWAY, this work is an exploration of experimental forms (let's think Virginia Woolf). Mr. Lippincott has chosen to break some elementary writing rules. For those with narrow minds who like to spout writing craft rules like fundamentalists (the people who cannot get past petty criticism), this departure may upset them. But for those of us who can think creatively and outside the box, ARCADIA is a joy and a true refreshing piece of fiction. A wonderful read!

Lippincott is a truly unique writer, persistant in his vision. One can hardly do more than salue the richness and strangeness, the odd illuminations of this book. The story is rare, accurate; the prose reflects a delicate sensibility, a moodiness that expresses a kind of poetry that one simply does not find in most cookie-cutter novels of the day. This writer deserves a wide audience, with readers patient enough to receive his deceptively light vision.

As both Edmund White and Ned Rorem suggest in their endorsements of OUR ARCADIA, Lippincott is up to something completely new and different here, and he succeeds marvelously. The form of the book--the many short chapters, and Lippincott's suggestive, painterly style, fit the content perfectly, leaving room for the reader and thus pulling him or her in far more than most traditional (and often overly heavy-handed) narratives. This is a sublime work of art, and one that will live.

While I liked the idea of the book--a group of likeminded individuals who form their own artistic haven--I found the author's writing to be flabby. More often than not, he tells you about the characters, their traits, and their motives rather than showing them to you. The result is that the text has a forced perspective, like propaganda. He uses anachronistic "therapy speak" for emotions ("your behavior is unhealthy and destructive") and has a habit for making all eight main characters to agree en masse (count the times he starts a sentence with the word "everyone," "immediately" or "of course." These things may seem petty but they really got on my nerves. I kept imagining how good the novel could have been with a heavier editorial hand.

While Mr. Lippincott certainly knows how to handle a pen (or, perhaps, laptop), this reader found OUR ARCADIA to be overwrought and rather too "precious" to be enjoyable and/or believable. Not a single character in the book's numerous short chapters was really likeable and most were downright annoying! Although the book is diminutive, it proved difficult (impossible!) to read more than a bit at a stretch...such was the soporific spell it cast.
Mr. Lippincott is technically talented--there's no question of that--but when it comes to telling a story that truly engages a reader he seems to have much to learn.