The Manikin: A Novel - Hardcover

Scott, Joanna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805039740 ISBN 13: 9780805039740

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 1996

Synopsis

In The Manikin, Scott leaves behind the exquisitely rendered vision of Egon Schiele's turn-of-the-century Vienna that distinguished her much-praised novel Arrogance and turns with equally prismatic powers to the eerie rural confines outside of Rochester, New York, early in our own century. The "Manikin" is not a mannequin but a mansion, the estate of the late Henry Craxton Sr., the "Henry Ford of Natural History," founder of Craxton's Scientific Establishment, whose specialty, taxidermy, made him rich - as the world's largest supplier of fossils, dinosaur bones, and stuffed animals. The Manikin is full of the Founder's handicrafts - gibbons and bats, owls and peacocks, quetzals and crocodiles - and it is here that young Peg Griswood arrives with her mother, the new housekeeper, in 1917, and where she will spend her formative years amid the staring, silent creatures and among a staff of eccentric servants and groundskeepers.

About this title

About the Author

Joanna Scott is the author of several books of fiction, including the novels Tourmaline and Make Believe, and the story collection Various Antidotes. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Lannan Award, and lives with her family in Rochester, New York.

From Publishers Weekly

With versatility and virtuosity to spare, Scott has employed her fecund imagination and intensely observant eye in three highly praised novels (the most recent was Arrogance) and one short-story collection (Various Antidotes). Each of the novels was distinguished by an unusual protagonist, meticulously detailed settings, a gothic atmosphere and Scott's interest in the junctions where life and art, or life and science, meet. Here the "art" is that of taxidermy, the business that enabled Harold Craxton to build the estate called the Manikin, a huge, gloomy house situated in the isolated countryside of upstate New York, where the narrative is set in 1927. Manikin is the word used in taxidermy for "the durable forms used to replace the animal's skelton," and dozens of stuffed creatures share the house with its human inhabitants: cranky widow Mrs. Craxton and a devoted (but overworked and underpaid) staff, some black, some white. In the course of the novel several dramas are played out, romance is both thwarted and fulfilled, a young woman comes of age and antagonisms between parents and children are endured and resolved. During a blizzard on Christmas Day, three momentous events occur in which everyone's future is instantly changed; six months later, the balance is again altered as Dionysian revels end in harsh reality. Scott's skilled handling of the interplay among a group of disparate people forced to live in close proximity is psychologically keen. But she miscalculates in the character of eccentric taxidermist Boggio, variously compared to the devil, a clown, a prophet, a wizard and "a true artist, rebellious in spirit." His sudden insight at the end is neither credible nor convincing; nor are the narrative's various segues from bildungsroman to gothic novel to Midsummer Night's Dream scenario. Yet Scott's formidable observational skills result in some enchanting writing. Her precise, evocative descriptions of the region's "irascible climate" and its flora and fauna, and of the zoological collection eerily inhabiting the house, glisten with brilliant specificity.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0805039740
• ISBN 13: 9780805039740
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 276