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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Jun 2007, 336 pages
Paperback:
Jun 2008, 352 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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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.
Excerpt
The Shadow Catcher
Let me tell you about the sketch by Leonardo I saw one afternoon in the Queen's Gallery in London a decade ago, and why I think it haunts me. The Queen's Gallery is on the west front side of Buckingham Palace, on a street that's always noisy, full of taxis rushing round the incongruous impediment of a massive residence in the middle of a route to Parliament and Westminster Abbey and, more importantly, a train station named Victoria. The Queen's Gallery is small, neither well maintained nor adequately lit, and when I went there to see the Royal Collection of Da Vinci drawings, the day was pissing rain and cold and damp, and the room smelled of wet wool seasoned in the lingering aroma of fry-up and vinegar, an atmosphere far removed from the immediacy, muscularity, and sunny beauty of Da Vinci's subjects.
There were drawings of male adolescents, drawings of chubby infants, drawings of rampant horses, toothless women, old men with spiky white hairs on their ...
When categorizing books by genre for BookBrowse I have been struck by the thought that a novel is simply a name for a book that doesn't fit neatly into any one genre. The Shadow Catcher is such a "novel" - combining two parallel storylines, one historical fiction, one contemporary; plus a dollop of autobiography, art criticism (supported by 30 interleaved photos) and travelogue. The result is an intelligent novel that defies categorization...continued
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Marianne Wiggins was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1947. Her father, a farmer, preached in a conservative Christian church founded by her grandfather. She married at 17 and shortly after gave birth to a daughter, Lara, who she brought up on Martha's Vineyard (Lara is now a professional photographer in Los Angeles and took the jacket and author photo for The Shadow Catcher). Wiggins's first book was published in 1975 but it wasn't until 1984 with the publication of Separate Checks that she ...
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