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From Publishers Weekly
The devil wears tweed in poet Weinstein's funny, catty first novel, a skewering of the university poetry scene. At a thinly veiled NYU, scholarship student and aspiring poet Annabelle Goldsmith becomes the assistant to her literary hero, the flower poet Z. (so called for her sexual poems about flowers). Unsurprisingly, Z. is a terror to work for, demanding "jet black, not midnight black, not shoeshine black" ink for her fountain pen, sending Annabelle to buy gifts for her lover ("silk boxers, a tasteful pattern") and asking her to research "masculine flowers" and design syllabi. Hungry for life experience to turn into poems of her own, Annabelle begins an affair with Harry, a 30-year-old graduate student who asks her to be Nora to his James Joyce and act out erotic scenarios involving gloves and typewriters in a famous dead novelist's abandoned country house. The novel conjures up all the rivalries, politics, scandals and affairs of 1980s academia, but caricaturish characters and Weinstein's almost relentless wittiness make the end result feel a bit contrived. Z.'s rebellious daughter, Claire, whose moods are reflected in her hair, and Z.'s cuckolded husband, Lars, are particularly flat. Smart but clueless Annabelle has pluck going for her, but she may try readers' patience: it takes her nearly the whole book to realize that her "mentor became her tormentor," and even then she's still shocked by Z.'s final act of exploitation. There's much to appreciate in this energetic satire, but it will appeal most to readers who've had a brush with this insular milieu.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com

Reading Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z., I felt grateful to be one of those poets who live far from academia and the politics of the poetry scene, where the rewards are small and the competition can be bloody. At the same time I felt sorry to be missing the raw energy of that scene, depicted here with a lively, wicked humor. This first novel is set in a prestigious university in New York City, where a few established poets teach and lord it over their less successful colleagues and students, all the while worrying about their love lives, their writers' blocks and their vulnerable reputations, and vying with each other for attention and praise.

Into this milieu comes our semi-innocent narrator, Annabelle, a misty-eyed scholarship student in love with the muse and assigned to be an assistant (apprentice, as she likes to think of it) to her heroine Z., the famous flower poet. "In the poetry world, Z. was part of an elite subculture -- the celebrity poet. Conversations stopped when she entered a room. Z. was the face in a crowd that people looked for at the department's weekly wine and cheese soirees." Annabelle's tasks, in her work for Z., are often hilarious. They range from buying hand towels for Z.'s parties ("a keen eye is essential in a poet . . . I like deep, rich colors for my hand towels -- blues, burgundies, and purples"), to researching poets named Jane, to visiting the botanical gardens and writing brief descriptions of flowers for Z. to consult when writing her signature poems. (Annabelle is paid $2 per flower described.) Anyone who has seen The Red Shoes and remembers the look on the music student's face when, from high in the cheap seats, he hears his teacher playing his music as if it were the teacher's own, or anyone who has read Meg Wolitzer's book The Wife, can quickly guess the destination toward which all of this is heading. Yet the journey described is an engaging one, written in spare, lucid prose, full of deadpan wit and entertaining characters.

There is Z.'s friend and champion, the critic Mrs. Van Elder, who makes or breaks poetic reputations: "In her younger days, she could bring a poet to prominence or ruin with a single adjective." Now an old woman whose books are arranged on her bookcase according to color, she has Annabelle polish her rusty tea kettle and recite Yeats's "The Circus Animals' Desertion" to her in a whisper.

There is Spence, who is having an affair with Z., and whose grandiose plans for poetry may seem only a little exaggerated: "I want the world to think poetry, the way it thinks television. . . . Wherever there is hope or triumph, poetry. Wherever there is poverty and despair, poetry. Wherever people gather under the night sky in search of a single star, poetry."

And then there is Harry, with whom Annabelle more or less falls in love, though it's hard for the reader to understand exactly why. He wants her to pretend to be Nora to his James Joyce and to walk around naked, except for high-heeled shoes and the kind of gloves Nora wore. Harry also had a writing mentor, now dead, a situation that plays out in a subplot that never quite takes off.

But the issue of mentor and pupil is central to this book, which is, after all, another variation on the coming-of-age novel. Annabelle may get more, and less, than she bargained for in her relationship with Z., but there are unexpected perks: "And suddenly I was the celebrity assistant. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to talk to me." More important, she has a lot to learn from Z., for good and for ill, and it is the arc of this learning that defines the book's structure, as it is the leitmotif "what is poetry?" that punctuates it.

In the best novels of academic satire, in David Lodge's books for instance, the characters transcend their stereotypes and become real people about whom we care. One of the problems with Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z. is that Weinstein doesn't always penetrate the surface of her characters, and even Annabelle can seem less than three-dimensional. As one of the students says in critiquing a poem, "it leads us to the edge of intimacy and pulls away."

Oddly enough, the villain of the piece, Z., is the most interesting and well-developed character. The reader is both charmed and appalled by her behavior, which is wonderfully perverse, and she often has amusingly offbeat ways of talking about poetry. When asked about the prose poem, for instance, she replies, "I'm a purist. It's either prose or it's poetry. One or the other. I don't take coffee in my tea." It is all too easy to satirize the poetry scene, particularly writers' workshops with their jargon and their competing egos.

Weinstein clearly has sat through enough of these to be hugely entertaining when describing them. What is more revealing, however, is the genuine love of poetry that manages to come through at odd moments and which deepens a book that often skims the surface of things. "I thought about the Frost poem I had failed to recite in Braun's class during our first meeting. It was about a bird trying to sing by not singing. The bird's song asked something like What can I make of my life, being such a small bird?" The answer to that question is what Annabelle is clearly looking for and, by the end of the book, is perhaps on her way to finding.

Reviewed by Linda Pastan

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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First Sentence:
This is the story of how I came to momentary prominence in the world of poetry and, through a series of misunderstandings, destroyed my good name and became a nobody. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Emily Dickinson, Van Elder, Marshall Greene, Braun Brown, Arthur Feld, New York City, Long Island, Jason Spence, Gay Farinette, Harry Banks, Meg Cross, English Department, Virginia Woolf, Nora Joyce, Lars Bovardine, Maurita Collins, Sag Harbor, Salvation Army, Sylvia Plath, The Needlepoint Poems, Villa of Mysteries, Walt Whitman, Annabelle Goldsmith, Herculaneum Gate, James Joyce New!
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