Martin Sloane - Hardcover

Redhill, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385259220 ISBN 13: 9780385259224

Publisher: Doubleday Canada, 2001

Synopsis

In 1984, Jolene Iolas, a student in upstate New York, encounters Martin Sloane''s art while visiting a Toronto gallery. Flush with the confidence of youth, she strikes up a correspondence with the older artist, and eventually the two become lovers. Introduced to a constancy of love she has never known, Jolene relaxes into the rituals of being someone''s other half. She learns Martin''s story and cherishes it as her own. He becomes a fixture in her life, a star in her sky. And then, he vanishes. There is no hint of his fate, no chain of cause to be followed. Over a long fall, the shock slowly hardening into fact, Jolene sheds her life, losing everything, including her oldest friend, Molly, to inexpressible grief. Ten years pass, Jolene slowly learns to stop trying to make sense of it all. But before she can fully return to life, the opportunity to confront a ghost arises. Word has come from Molly, of all people, that someone named Sloane has been exhibiting artworks identical to Martin''s in Irish galleries. Jolene travels to Dublin, where she reluctantly reconnects with Molly and together, they find themselves lost in a jumble of pasts as they try to piece together what happened to Martin Sloane. An exquisitely crafted novel, Martin Sloane is about the mysteries of love and art, the weight of history, and what it means to bear memory for the missing and the dead.

About this title

Review

When Martin Sloane, Toronto poet and playwright Michael Redhill's first novel, appeared in Canada, it made headlines for its decade-long gestation through 12 complete drafts. In an age when many blockbuster novels read as though they never saw an editor's pencil, Redhill's stamina and ruthless self-appraisal were enough to make him newsworthy. But all that attention to its composition raises a basic question about the book itself: was Martin Sloane worth all the effort?

As it turns out, Redhill's debut is an intense, poetic evocation of the experience of time and place and the personality of a fictional Irish-Canadian collage artist, Martin Sloane, whose work, if not his life, resembles the nostalgic boxes built by the real-life artist Joseph Cornell. Told in the voice of his abandoned lover Jolene Iolas, the story explores the connection between Sloane's life and his art. Iolas, who had a relationship with the older Sloane in her youth, ends up following the cold trail of his life back to Dublin, where he lived as a boy before he was exiled by illness and first began to pack up his life in little boxes. Redhill has created a powerful meditation on life and memory, his work as a poet standing him in good stead. Even if some of the characters are not quite fully realized and the narrative transitions are at times a little rough, Martin Sloane proves that hard work pays off. Long live revision. --Robyn Gillam

About the Author

Michael Redhill is a poet and playwright. He lives in Toronto. Martin Sloane is his first novel.

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday Canada
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0385259220
• ISBN 13: 9780385259224
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288