Lee and Elaine

By Ann Rower

A woman wants a new life. Finding herself at a crossroads, she falls for one of her older female art students, a move that leads to new entanglements - funny, sexy, violent - which finally push her to make the break with her settled, heterosexual past. She takes a winter rental in East Hampton, near the famous artists? cemetery, Green River, and becomes obsessed with the graves and lives of women artists who are buried there. They?re mostly the wives of more famous men, especially Elaine De Kooning and Lee Krasner, the wife of Jackson Pollock. She plans to write a book in which Lee and Elaine come back as ghosts, as lesbians and as lovers. When Elaine?s stone is discovered to be missing one day, all hell breaks out in the narrator?s real life. She?s forced to start anew, alone, everything different. Her obsession with Lee and Elaine brings her into contact with all of their women artist friends. Eventually, she learns that she has to let go of the past and move on, which she does after a scary, hilarious night alone in the cemetery, if you don?t count the ghosts. At a time when the reputations of Pollock, De Kooning and Abstract Expressionism are at their highest, Lee & Elaine reminds us of the gifted women in the background. This is a brilliantly funny, sharp book about romance, life, death, and artistic creation.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1852424168
• ISBN13: 9781852424169
• Release Date: March 2002
• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.7" x 5.0"

Customer Reviews

Green River

This book is just as direct and funny as Ann Rower's two previous books, which makes it a brisk, enjoyable read. Rower's work is about her own life as a kind of "fiction." In her first two books the characters were all real people (with their real names intact) from the author's life. Here, some characters are pseudonymous. L & E centers on Rower's obsession with the women artists (Hannah Wilke, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner) buried in the Green River Cemetary in Springs, Long Island along with guys like Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt and Stuart Davis. Rower moves out to Long Island (leaving a long term hetero-sexual relationship in the process) to do research, that evolves into an improbable supposition-what if the two extremely straight Ab-Ex divas (EdK & LK) had been lovers??? This turns out to be most relevant to the author's personal life as she breaks with her straight past and plunges ( albeit, tentatively and with attendent qualms) into an edgy relationship with one of her lesbian students. Somehow all of this book-about-trying- to write-a-book stuff, could be self-indulgent in the hands of a lesser writer. But Rower's economical "redactive" prose- the dialog sampled from her own messy experiences- makes fun of herself first of all. In writing a book about trying to write a book, Rower smudges boundaries- in sex and in art,in between fiction and memoir and in the process, the reader attains a kind of comic self-reflexive zing, of pleasure and finely observed truth.

Play It Back

Ann Rower's hilarious and edgy third novel chronicles her "research" into the lives of two female artists, Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning. As everyone knows, these two brilliant women pursued ambition and power by the only means available to them in their time: by producing the careers of their husbands. But this is no normal art criticism. By asking the dumbest (profoundest) of questions - Why couldn't Lee and Elaine have been friends? - she's forced to question just about everything. She eases her way out of a 20 year long monogomous hetero-relationship and starts dating girls, all the while wondering, Why can't things just be different?Rower is a brilliant chronicler of the minutae of daily life, famous for her faux-casual, conversational writing style, which was once described as "a late night phone conversation with a friend," but this time there's real terror involved. Tied to a bedpost with scarves by her possibly suicidal girl-student, bluffing her way through New Age Goddess rituals, pissing off most of the East Hampton Pollock/de Kooning cabal, Rower's narrator is ready for anything and she's able to microscopically detail everything's cost. It is anxiety brut, free of the angst. While the narrator's "research" might seem a bit sketchy in normal art-critical terms, in fact it's completely devoted and active: she wants to change history, not just interpret the past. And by the narrator's willingness to let her two ghostly subjects, Lee and Elaine, become part of her present, she actually does.