Lee & Elaine

By Ann Rower

Ann Rower's forgotten turn-of-the-millennium classic that looks at the lives of Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning with obsessed, louche brilliance.

Maybe it was the car, the dangerous thrill of driving around, fast. I'm from the suburbs. I love driving, especially a red car, even a rental. Nothing is really mine. Maybe that's what I love. Is that sick? I skidded a little, taking a turn too quick, looking at the water not the road. I knew the roads weren't that safe. There had been many famous accidents out here. I almost did a Jackson--Jackson Pollock's drunk car tree Saturday night death on this same road. But I was struggling to eat a muffin, not slugging from a pint like he must have been, while juggling his scared girlfriend and her terrified friend.

Separating from her long-term partner Jack and beginning a passionate affair with a much younger female student, the narrator of Lee and Elaine takes time off to write. Leaving Manhattan for an off-season Springs, East Hampton rental and haunting the Green River Cemetery where artistic giants of the mid-twentieth century are buried, she becomes obsessed with the lives and friendship of Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning, who were both artists and the wives of famous men. They were always so peripheral, she writes. Suddenly I wanted to find out about these women. Find them, period.

First published by Serpent's Tail's in 2002, the novel was republished as an ebook in 2013 by Emily Books. Written with Rower's trademark louche and brilliant, mouthy, and deceptively casual style, it remains a forgotten classic of the turn of the millennium. With piercing and hilarious straightforwardness, the narrator turns the process of unearthing art-world gossip and tearing down her own life's substructure into a searching and original examination of sexuality and friendship, art and ambition.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1635902746
• ISBN13: 9781635902747
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: Semiotext(e)
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.81 lbs.

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.