Product Description

Following her National Book Award finalist, Evidence of Things Unseen, Marianne Wiggins turns her extraordinary literary imagination to the American West, where the life of legendary photographer Edward S. Curtis is the basis for a resonant exploration of history and family, landscape and legacy.

The Shadow Catcher dramatically inhabits the space where past and present intersect, seamlessly interweaving narratives from two different eras: the first fraught passion between turn-of-the-twentieth-century icon Edward Curtis (1868-1952) and his muse-wife, Clara; and a twenty-first-century journey of redemption.

Narrated in the first person by a reimagined writer named Marianne Wiggins, the novel begins in Hollywood, where top producers are eager to sentimentalize the complicated life of Edward Curtis as a sunny biopic: "It's got the outdoors. It's got adventure. It's got the do-good element." Yet, contrary to Curtis's esteemed public reputation as servant to his nation, the artist was an absent husband and disappearing father. Jump to the next generation, when Marianne's own father, John Wiggins (1920-1970), would live and die in equal thrall to the impulse of wanderlust.

Were the two men running from or running to? Dodging the false beacons of memory and legend, Marianne amasses disparate clues -- photographs and hospital records, newspaper clippings and a rare white turquoise bracelet -- to recover those moments that went unrecorded, "to hear the words only the silent ones can speak." The Shadow Catcher, fueled by the great American passions for love and land and family, chases the silhouettes of our collective history into the bright light of the present.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #96491 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780743265218
• Condition: USED - GOOD
• Notes:
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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.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Wendy Smith

There are passages in Marianne Wiggins's eighth novel so piercingly beautiful that I put the book down, shook my head and simply said, "Wow." She's reproduced a number of photographs in her text -- appropriately, since her subject is a photographer -- but these physical images pale in comparison to the pictures she creates with words. Buoyed by Wiggins's gorgeous prose, we soar in the very first scene, as she imagines flying over California, "on the edge, at night, after the coyotes end their braying, there's an hour after midnight when a silence drops into these canyons which persists 'til the first birdsong of morning." Before plunging into the particulars of her story, we already know that this restless, challenging author is once again asking us to contemplate the deeper meaning of our national character and destiny, the ways the American landscape has shaped us and we have shaped it.

In Evidence of Things Unseen, her previous explosion of creative energy, Wiggins took as her touchstone Moby-Dick, the Ur-text of every metaphysically inclined novelist. Here the reference point is Huckleberry Finn. She ponders the moral responsibility of those who, like Huck, "light out for the territory" and of those who claim to truthfully depict it.

At the center of The Shadow Catcher is the real-life photographer Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952). Wiggins combines Curtis's experiences with the adventures of a woman she has created named Marianne Wiggins. This Marianne has written a novel about Curtis, and there are some things that trouble her about his work. His early 20th-century photographs of American Indians fixed their image as a noble, doomed race. "But they're lies," Marianne says. "They're propaganda." Curtis altered his photos to eliminate such traces of modern life as cars and clocks; his subjects were no longer roaming the plains, but "confined in high-security encampments . . . deprived of their livelihoods, forced into the manufacture of 'Indian-ized' tourist junk."

Absorbed in his mythmaking, the photographer abandoned his family for years at a time; his wife, Clara, finally divorced him in 1919. So why, Marianne wonders, would their four children inscribe his gravestone with the words "Beloved Father" and choose to be buried around him? No sooner has she posed these questions than Marianne is confronted with a disturbing puzzle concerning her own father. He's been dead for more than 30 years, but she gets a call saying that a man with his driver's license and Social Security number is in the cardiac ICU of a Las Vegas hospital.

At this point, Marianne drops out of the narrative for 100 pages while we follow the story of Clara Phillips, a young woman who travels from civilized St. Paul to remote Washington Territory, where she falls in love with Edward Curtis. It's clear that this strange man will bring her little besides misery, but he convinces her to stay with him -- and then, just as suddenly, we return to Marianne, now en route to a Las Vegas hospital with questions about her father and Edward Curtis.

I don't know how closely Marianne's experiences approximate those of the author, who thanks her sister in the acknowledgments "for the license to decorate our shared history." What matters is that she is a completely credible fictional creation, whose quest to find out how a dying man came to assume her father's identity unexpectedly leads her to the discovery of a long-hidden aspect of Curtis's life. Getting her there requires some very big coincidences, most involving Lester Owns His Shadow, a Navajo whom Marianne meets in Las Vegas. Indians called Curtis "the Shadow Catcher," and Wiggins's use of Lester's name (and remarks) to make the point that the photographer's subjects "had their shadows stolen" is among several instances of her tendency to overdo the metaphors.

This is merely the fault of an author with a lot to say who could sometimes be more disciplined but could hardly be more stimulating. Even Marianne's meandering drive to Vegas, which initially seems like an irritating digression, eventually takes us back to the novel's main themes. Her story and Curtis's contain a wealth of common images that accumulate to give the closing pages a powerful emotional charge. It's no accident that those images -- flying, chasing shadows, hearing a train whistle -- all suggest movement, for the author's central preoccupation is the human journey through territory and time. Curtis's and Marianne's fathers both took their most important journeys alone. "It's impossible to know for sure if they were running from or running to," muses the narrator. "Huck never says where or what he's bound for, he just needs to go. Make tracks. Get outta Dodge. Hit the highway. Avoid, elude, escape Aunt Sally."

Riffing on Huck's famous final declaration, Wiggins offers a distinctively feminine perspective, enumerating civilization's constraints: "We all have our own Aunt Sally. . . . Call her parenthood. Domestic mess. Daily reminder of debt and obligation." Clara was that reminder for her husband, who left her behind just as Marianne's father left his young wife with a photo that proclaimed, "This is us when we were happy."

In The Shadow Catcher, as too often in the real world, women get stuck with kids and debts and painful memories of vanished happiness when their men light out for the territory. But Wiggins is too intelligent and subtle to leave it at that. Her most magnificent prose is lavished on bravura evocations of wide-open American spaces that acknowledge their complex appeal to men and women alike. "The sound my nation makes" -- another of the resonant phrases that echo through the text -- could be a train whistle tempting us to make tracks, if this were a Hollywood movie. In the final moments of Wiggins's stirring novel, it is instead a sound of connection and continuity: "the stubborn, uninterrupted susurration of lives stirring from the shadows toward sustaining light."

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
The Shadow Catcher is Marianne Wiggins's eighth novel. Over a career that has spanned more than 30 years and included a Pulitzer Prize nomination for Evidence of Things Unseen (2003), the author has built a reputation as a stylist and a storyteller with an eye for distinctive, character-driven material. Her latest effort plays with the "traditional" novel in ways that make reviewers sweat. The book's mixed critical reception-certainly more positive than negative-likely has as much to do with questions of what to make of a novel so difficult to pin down as with any specific grievances over what Wiggins attempts here. Not surprisingly, the more straightforward narrative with Curtis and Clare resonated with reviewers more.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Unpredicted in the best way...
"The Shadow Catcher" is a highly enjoyable novel. The frame story uses a device that seems to be coming up in a lot of very recent books: the main character, who tells the story, has the same name as the author, and seems to have many similar characteristics. "Marianne Wiggins" -- the character who might be the author -- begins with some observations about artwork: "Let me tell you about the sketch by Leonardo I saw one afernoon in the Queen's Gallery in London a decade ago, and why I think it haunts me." (p. 1)

The first two chapters could possibly be autobiograpical: the narrator is a writer, trying to sell a script to an unnamed Hollywood personality. She lives in LA and obsesses about traffic and alterate ways to avoid the worst congestion. She knows about celebrities. She has a home and a car. Her book is about Edward Curtis, photographer, who created the common understanding of what it looked like to be an Indian. All the details of her life could be either truth or fiction: it's not a critical matter.

On page 43, the novel turns to "her" book. It starts with the early life of Edward Curtis's wife Clara, daughter of a painter whose works are no longer desired because photography has replaced his skills. We see how she and her younger brother happened to travel out to the territory of Washington to live with his family. As Clara meets Edward Curtis, we meet him. As he develops into a skilled and artful photographer, we see him through her eyes, and we find out how she teaches him what she's learned about painting: the link to the first thoughts of "Marianne Wiggins" and her passion for Renaissance Italian art.

A marvelous aspect of The Shadow Catcher is the constant reference to the works of Curtis, which are reproduced so much that every reader can probably visualize them. In case you don't have the photos in your mind's eye, very small reproductions of the works and of other relevant material appear in the text: I think the use of illustrations in a novel is another 21st century trick that's coming into its own. (You can also find very good reproductions online.)

Eventually a completely unexpected turn of events in the Frame Story causes an unexpected nexus between "Marianne Wiggins" the narrator, the legacy of Edward Curtis, and even the title of the book. The author leaves behind the early themes of creating visual art and of comparing photography to painting. There's nothing wrong with the way the book treats these themes, but the unexpected plot element is what makes a seemingly predictable work into an exciting read. I don't want this to be a spoiler, so I'll stop now.

Sparkling, humorous, ironic, soaring, transcendent
For two years Marianne Wiggins traveled the country doggedly researching Edward Curtis, the famous and highly controversial American Indian photographer and ethnologist. Wiggins wanted to write a novel about this man. She wanted to get inside him--understand him, and write a novel that exposed the real human being behind the legend.

Curtis' life only recently became public domain: he is dead and all his children are dead. Now, he is fair fodder for historical novelists. But Wiggins is not a genre historical novelist. She is a gifted literary novelist, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, a writer of formidable originality. Why would she undertake a project like this? What alchemy did she have in mind?

When she began her quest to dig into Curtis' life, Wiggins was in love with the idea of the man--the handsome, creative, rugged, bigger-than-life, self-made frontiersman. But the more she researched, the more she began to dislike him--the more she wanted to drop the project altogether. But she persisted, and this persistence actually becomes an integral part of the novel. In looking for the story in Curtis, she finds the story in herself, her own life, her own relationship to her father. Wiggins' historical novel about Edward Curtis eventually leads us deep into the psychology of magical explaining--of myth making for mental health's sake. The result is pure literary gold.

So what alchemy does Wiggins ultimately deliver in this novel? The work is actually two novels in one: one set in Curtis' early years and the other set in the author's present. The construction is liberating--pure magic pops up unexpectedly throughout. Wiggins creates a compelling, transcendent, soaring work of fiction. So breathtaking is Wiggins' prose, that at times I found myself stopping, closing my eyes, and just savoring the aching perfection of a passage. Here is prose that is sparkling, humorous, ironic, soaring, transcendent--and yet at the same time it is prose that finds room for snapping social commentary and for me, most enjoyable of all, life-affirming thematic insights. I was spellbound from the first few pages.

Wiggins begins her novel in the present day, with herself as the first-person narrator. Wiggins (the character) has written a book about Edward Curtis and her agent arranges an appointment with some Hollywood types who want to option her book for a movie. She arrives home after the interview, to find a series of mysterious messages from a hospital in Las Vegas. They have an unconscious, near-death patient in their ICU who the hospital identifies as Wiggins' father. But Wiggins knows that her father unmistakably committed suicide decades earlier. Who is this imposter? Why has he stolen her father's identity? Why does he carry a newspaper article about her in his wallet? And so the mystery begins.

But in this short opening section, Wiggins also pulls out the stops--she entertains the reader with a full symphony of literary talents. The overture is a soaring love song to America, the country in her heart, and to Los Angeles, the city in her soul. She follows this with humorous and biting social commentary about the movie-making business. If you read this brief opening section and are not thoroughly won over by this novel...well, all I can say is that this work is not for you. But it had me from the first page!

Enveloped inside this present-day story, we find the other novel. This second novel is presented in two long sections, with a brief visit to the present-day story in between. The inner novel is a third-person narrative written in a completely different tone--somber, haunting, slow. The focus is full-on characterization. This is prototypical, heart-wrenching, transcendent historical fiction and it tells the early life of Edward Curtis from the point of view of his long-suffering wife, Clara. Through Clara's life, from the woman's point of view, Wiggins is able to unmask part, but not all, of the man who Curtis was underneath the legend.

Clara's life with Curtis was brief. Wiggins uses her present-day narrative to explain important aspects of Curtis' later years. Ultimately, she uses this plot line to provide the evidence that finally pulls the curtain aside and reveals what may only have been guessed at before.

In the end, this is a novel about myth-making, magical explaining--what we all do, everyday, to maintain our mental health. How we reinvent the truth, so we can live within it. This is a book about children of absent fathers, how these children desperately cling to myths about their fathers in order to help them live with the reality of their abandonment. It is also about how these children are destined forever to try to win their fathers' attention and approval. It is a novel about the impossibility of knowing anyone's motives, even one's own. It is a novel about how the Curtis children saw their father as a man who could do no harm, even when wrong was all he ever did. It is novel about how our species creates whatever stories we need just so we can cope.

In the end, Marianne Wiggins does a magnificent job of bringing the complex portrait of Edward Curtis to life. When the book ends, we feel we know this man--his personality, what drives him. As a bonus, we start questioning our own lives--trying to uncover the magical explaining in our own everyday lives. Do our myths truly help us, or are we better off knowing and living with the real truth? Can we ever know the truth?

This is not a book for everyone. Some readers will be offended by the license that Wiggins takes with Curtis' life. Others will be put off by the thematic digressions that move the reader away from the compelling plot. These same readers will probably be unimpressed with the great richness these thematic digressions provide. I predict that women will love this novel more than men because it gives an unabashedly woman's point of view about significant matters of the heart. All this being said, I recommend this work highly. I can easily see why Wiggins was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize (for another, earlier work). I have no doubt that she will go on to achieve greater national recognition in the future.

A deep and layered read
Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952) was a remarkable photographer, skilled in the sort of black-and-white photography that graces calendars and history books, the nuanced shades and shadows giving life to men and women and landscapes that existed well before any that are encased in our contemporary memories. The vanishing tribes of the great American West, the victims of our push towards the Pacific, the peoples who were here to enjoy the natural splendor of this country before the aggressive white man came to pass over its hills and valleys --- this is the world that Curtis showcased in his lush yet stark photography.

However, as Marianne Wiggins points out, he often dressed members of different tribes in one tribe's dress to make the picture look better. That way, the Sioux, Cherokees and others were as mixed-up as his emotional world, where loving his family interfered with his freewheeling artistic life and thus caused so much conflict that his wife was forced to divorce him after years of happiness together. He is the P.T. Barnum of the post-Custer experience, a pioneer of good old American spin that the author documents with a novelist's eyes and ears.

Wiggins is also a character in this book. Like Augusten Burroughs, Norman Mailer and Hunter Thompson, she documents one American life by contextualizing its emotional messiness with examples from her own personal journey. As Curtis constantly escapes his wife Clara and their family to find freedom in his art, so too does Wiggins's dad look for that elusive freedom by separating from the family when she was young, leaving a photo behind that reads "When we were happy." This is messy stuff, an all-American story of two human beings whose penchant for some greater liberation made the love and devotion of their families feel like the Ancient Mariner's albatross, clasped firmly around the neck, choking the life out of them.

The book, written with Wiggins's immeasurable skill in word manipulation, is a fascinating study of all the things that make a man an iconic American male --- the need for freedom, great passion, love of the road, a heart that can invite and incite great love but can't deal with the everyday responsibilities that kind of intimacy brings. When Wiggins, on her way to a surreal meeting with Hollywood types about writing a screenplay adaptation of this book, is confronted by a man whose I.D. makes him out to be her long-lost and long-thought deceased father, the intensity of the narrative increases. It's not just a biopic waiting to happen; instead, the author finds herself examining Curtis's story for clues as to why her own paterfamilia decided that the American road held greater promise than their little backyard. This twist adds a poignancy and a bit of poison to Curtis's story.

The reader can't help but feel badly for Wiggins and thus feel that Curtis and all other like-minded men are somewhat bad guys for following passions that proved too bountiful for domesticity. It is a strange place to put readers --- giving them a hero who they may not be supporting completely, surrounding his artistic achievements with Barnum-esque baloney that lessens the impact of his work somewhat. THE SHADOW CATCHER is a pentimento --- the further you peel off the surface, the more there is underneath, a whole world that could only be examined by entering it from a contemporary mindset.

Wiggins has given us a deep and layered read that will require more than your usual beach reading time to absorb. Do yourself a favor and read it twice --- once straight through and then again to take in how her personal story reflects on Curtis's mendacity. THE SHADOW CATCHER casts a long shadow --- and when the sun comes out again, it doesn't shy away from the realities it exposes.

--- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano