From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Wiggins (
Evidence of Things Unseen, etc.) takes a magnificently Sebald-like approach to fictionalizing the life of photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868–1952)—along with that of a woman named "Marianne Wiggins." The book opens as Wiggins presents her newly completed Curtis novel to a Hollywood agent. Curtis photographed American Indians in the early 20th century, and Marianne attacks the common image of Curtis as a swashbuckler who risked his life to photograph his favorite subjects. Even as she shows that Curtis staged the shots, and was an absentee husband and father at best, the agent is enthralled. Marianne, ambivalent, arrives home to a phone call that her father is in a Las Vegas hospital—the father who has been dead for 30 years. From that quick setup, the novel moves seamlessly back and forth between Marianne's painstaking research into Curtis's life and the journey she undertakes seeking closure with her father's past. Photographs taken by Curtis and from the Wiggins's family album, which she approaches from multiple angles, give the story several layers of immediacy. Curtis emerges as a fascinating, complex figure, one who inhabited any number of American contradictions. Suffused with Marianne's crackling social commentary and deceptively breezy self-discovery, Wiggins's eighth novel is a heartfelt tour de force.
(June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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*Starred Review* Wiggins is a writer who paints elegant pictures with words. So who better to tell the story of Edward Sheriff Curtis, the enigmatic photographer of the American West, protege of J. P. Morgan, and friend of Theodore Roosevelt? She chooses to tell the story from her own point of view, through a fictionalized version of herself, called by her own name. Summoned to Hollywood to discuss turning her book about Curtis into a movie, Wiggins makes it plain to the director, who wants to make him a romantic hero, that he was anything but. He paid the Bureau of Indian Affairs a fee to photograph inside the reservations that he drove to in his car, abandoning his wife and four children and spending all their money to follow his obsession. At the same time she is pitching the movie, her personal life gets a bit hectic, and the links between Curtis' past and her present intertwine, if a little too coincidentally, at least very interestingly. The book slips from Wiggins' point of view to that of Curtis' long-suffering wife, Clara. The pages are liberally sprinkled with photographs, insights, realistic pathos, and human situations. This creative novel will not disappoint.
Elizabeth DickieCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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