Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION TIL | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Valley Library (Lakeland) | FICTION TIL | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Today we live in a "glut of images." What does that mean? Men and Apparitions takes on a central question of our era through the wild musings and eventful life of Ezekiel Hooper Stark, cultural anthropologist, ethnographer, specialist in family photographs.
We are the Picture People. I name us Picture People because most special and obvious about the species is, our kind lives on and for pictures, lives as and for images, our species takes pictures, makes pix, thinks in pix.
What is behind the human drive to create, remake, and keep images from and of everything? What does it mean that we now live in a "glut of images?" Men and Apparitions takes on a central question of our era through the wild musings and eventful life of Ezekiel Hooper Stark, cultural anthropologist, ethnographer, specialist in family photographs. As Ezekiel progresses from a child obsessed with his family's photo albums to a young and passionate researcher to a man devastated by betrayal in love, his academic fascinations determine and reflect his course, touching on such various subjects as discarded images, pet pictures, spirit mediums, the tragic life of his long-dead cousin the semi-famous socialite Clover Adams, and the nature of contemporary masculinity.
Kaleidoscopic and encyclopedic, madcap and wry, this book that showcases Lynne Tillman not only as a brilliant original novelist but also as one of our most prominent thinkers on culture and visual culture today.
Author Notes
Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. Her novels are Haunted Houses ; Motion Sickness ; Cast in Doubt ; No Lease on Life , a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; American Genius, A Comedy ; and Men and Apparitions . Her nonfiction books include The Velvet Years: Warhol's Factory 1965-1967 , with photographs by Stephen Shore; Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co. ; and What Would Lynne Tillman Do? , a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Her most recent short story collections are Someday This Will Be Funny and The Complete Madame Realism . She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writing Fellowship. Tillman is Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at The University of Albany and teaches at the School of Visual Arts' Art Criticism and Writing MFA Program in New York. She lives in Manhattan with bass player David Hofstra.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The latest from Tillman (American Genius, A Comedy) is a timely, if messy, exploration of modern masculinity, told from the perspective of Ezekiel Hooper Stark, a 30-something ethnographer and assistant professor who sifts through photographs to construct the narratives of family and strangers. Told in fragmented mini chapters, Zeke chronicles his own early life-absent, alcoholic father; rude older brother; semimute little sister-before pivoting to his turbulent, brief marriage to Maggie, a college sweetheart. While on a trip to London together, Zeke learns of Maggie's love affair with his friend Curtis. The revelation sends him into a fugue state, and Zeke bounces around Europe, only to return to the United States a divorcé, pretending to be a number of different people under false names. He finds kinship in the story of his ancestor, socialite and photographer Clover Hooper Adams, and turns his attention to the study of what he calls the "New Man." As always, Tillman is inventive in her approach to storytelling, inserting photos and allowing Zeke's mind to wander. While there is much to admire, occasionally Zeke's digressions impede narrative flow. The result is a novel full of fits and starts, equally charming and frustrating. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The first novel in more than a decade from the cult-figure author of American Genius (2006), etc."When artists incorporate or appropriate unsophisticated or nave work in their work, a double consciousness plays that game. Or, to say it another way, the artists are presenting visual meta-fictions." How a reader reacts to this passage will likely predict how a reader will react to this novel as a whole. Indeed, to call Tillman's latest a novel at all is provocative. There is scant dialogue, little in the way of action, and, to the extent that there's a narrative, it's spread so thin over the course of nearly 400 pages that it essentially disappears. There is a narrator, but to call him a main character would be an overstatement, as he never quite materializes as anything more than a collection of erudite observations. He does have a nameEzekial Starkand an age38. Both are largely irrelevant. What matters about Zeke is his vocation as an ethnographer. Once Zeke explains that his "focus on images in, by, and of the family includes sexual and gendered behavior and relationships as understood in those pictures," we have learned pretty much everything we're going to learn about Zeke. Tillman is more of a cultural critic than a storyteller, and her latest is essentially a collection of essays on photography, identity, and masculinity. This isn't scholarly writing, exactly. Rather than presenting a thesis and supporting it with evidence, Tillman makes an assertion, drops a few signifiersVirginia Woolf, John Cage, the Unabomber, Jeff Bridges as The Dudeand moves on. Readers interested in and knowledgeable about Clifford Geertz, Gerhard Richter, and Jean Baudrillard might find that Tillman has some interesting things to say about their work. It must be said, however, that she has nothing to say about the Kardashians that hasn't been said a thousand times before.For Tillman superfans only. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* After her previous novel, American Genius (2006), Tillman published collections of short stories and essays, including What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (2014), which showcases her fluency in the subjects that preoccupy her latest brainy, brooding, riffing, and infuriating narrator, Ezekiel Hooper Stark, a 38-year-old cultural anthropologist studying old family photo albums. Anxiously inquisitive, funny, and philosophical, Zeke analyzes our enthrallment to photographic images, and declares, We are the Picture People. His idiosyncratic and witty interpretations of the snapshots of strangers summon memories of his Massachusetts boyhood, including an epiphany triggered by a praying mantis; the painful demise of his marriage; and his fervid sense of connection to a suicidal ancestor, photographer Clover Hooper Adams. Zeke ponders the mystery of perception and the ever-encroaching role of pictures in our lives, ultimately focusing on evolving gender roles and the befuddled New Man. With callouts to a mind-revving roster of photographers, writers, filmmakers, intellectuals, and media magnets, erudite, discerning, and ever-daring Tillman has forged a mischievous conflation of criticism and fiction. Incantatory, maddening, brilliant, zestful, compassionate, and timely, Tillman's portrait of a floundering academic trying to make sense of a digitized world of churning, contradictory messages reveals the perpetual interplay between past and present, the personal and the cultural, image and life.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2018 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Tillman's first novel in 12 years (after American Genius, A Comedy and some nonfiction titles) comes in the form of an extended interior monolog. The protagonist, Ezekiel Hooper Stark, is a cultural anthropologist/ethnographer with a special expertise in family photographs. Zeke is accustomed to viewing and analyzing his world from a distance, almost as an alien observer, much like the praying mantis he identifies with as a child in his backyard. As such, it is true to his character that a story ostensibly about him becomes largely a meditation on many other things-philosophy, photography, art, television, popular culture, and feminism, to name a few. These meanderings will appeal to readers with a particular interest in cultural criticism, though others will be impatient for the passages in which he shares details about his fascinating family background (he's a descendant of the historical figures Henry and Clover Adams) as well as his own life story, spousal betrayal, and subsequent breakdown. VERDICT Tillman is a risk-taker with a wide-ranging mind who likes to experiment with the novel form. This extremely cerebral exercise is studded with fascinating observations and commentary. Literary collections will want to acquire it.-Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., -Holbrook, NY © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
