Martin Sloane - Softcover

Redhill, Michael

3.57

574 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385259875 ISBN 13: 9780385259873

Publisher: Anchor Books, 2001

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In 1984, Jolene Iolas, a student in upstate New York, encounters Martin Sloane's work while visiting a Toronto gallery. She strikes up a correspondence with the older artist, and eventually they become lovers. And then, without warning, without a word, he vanishes. There is no hint of his fate, no chain of cause and effect to be followed. Over the following months, Jolene sheds her life, losing everything, including her oldest friend, Molly, to her grief. Ten years pass, and Jolene begins to live with Martin's disappearance. But then the opportunity to confront her ghost arises. Word comes from, of all people, Molly, that someone named Sloane has been exhibiting in Irish galleries. Jolene travels to Dublin, where she is reluctantly reunited with her old friend. Together, the two women become lost in a jumble of pasts as they try to piece together what happened to Martin Sloane. Seamlessly crafted and beautifully written, Martin Sloane evokes the mysteries of love and art, the weight of history, and what it means to bear memory for the missing and the dead.

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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.

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