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“Women almost never become art monsters,” Jenny Offill wrote in her 2014 novel “Dept. of Speculation” (one of the Book Review’s favorite novels that year), “because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things.”
I
don’t know if the five painters in Mary Gabriel’s group biography
“Ninth Street Women” qualify as art monsters, quite — certainly not to
the same extent as their male peers and husbands — but they would
definitely recognize where Offill was coming from. Gabriel’s is one of
two books we recommend this week about women coming into their own as
artists (the other is Liana Finck’s graphic memoir, “Passing for
Human”), and they sit comfortably alongside a couple of works of fiction
by women who have long established themselves as devoted masters of
craft: a new novel by Kate Walbert and a story collection by Deborah
Eisenberg.
There’s also a history of
duels, fisticuffs and other violence among 19th-century congressmen as
the country braced for civil war, and a trove of novels including a
World War I story, an immigration narrative and a debut set in Ohio (the
book is titled “Ohio”) that encompasses some of our culture’s most
intractable problems. Finally, there’s the concluding volume of Karl Ove
Knausgaard’s six-part autobiographical novel “My Struggle”: proof that
it’s eminently possible to concern yourself with art and mundane things
all at the same time.
Source: New York Time
