"The Americans"
by Robert Frank
Steidl, 180 pp., $39.95
The 83 black-and-white photographs in Robert Frank's "The Americans" are bound by an intense sense of loneliness, whether they evoke a New York City cocktail party; a St. Petersburg, Fla., bus bench; or a funeral in St. Helena, S.C. Originally published in 1958, the book — just reissued in a 50th anniversary edition — focuses on people in the middle of their lives, lost, trying to come to some sort of reckoning.
Frank's genius was to see America unfiltered, much like Walker Evans (whose "American Photographs" is an obvious precursor to "The Americans") and Dorothea Lange. There are no tricks here, no posing or false glory, just a sense of desolation, "(t)hat crazy feeling in America," as Jack Kerouac writes in his introduction, "when the sun is hot on the streets and the music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral."
What's most remarkable is Frank's timing, the way he caught the republic at exactly the moment it was becoming the country in which we live today. In these pages, we can see it — the postwar world yielding to something else entirely, as clear as the teenagers making out in a public park in Ann Arbor, Mich., or the newlyweds embracing, full of lust and desperation, in the lobby of the City Hall in Reno, Nev.
Reviewed by David Ulin
Los Angeles Times
"The Spiritualist"
by Megan Chance
Three Rivers Press, 432 pp., $14.95
Atmospheric and intriguing, this novel by Indianola (Kitsap Peninsula) author Megan Chance is set in upper-class New York society of the 1850s, where the working-class Evelyn has married a member of the prestigious Atherton family. To general astonishment, her husband — a recent convert to spiritualism and an enthusiastic partaker in séances — is found murdered and cast into the East River. Rapacious Atherton relatives try to seize the victim's money and assets by pinning the murder on Evelyn, who must act fast to find the real killer.
The novel has an almost palpably dark and wintry feel, and it's not initially clear whether the little group of spiritualists (headed by the charismatic Michel Jourdain) is composed of charlatans or visionaries. As Evelyn pursues her inquiries (where was her husband in the last days before his murder?), she enters a dark underworld that teaches her some shocking truths about his death — and his life. Then she has to find her own way forward, in a way she could never before have imagined.
Reviewed by Melinda Bargreen
Special to The Seattle Times
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