GREAT GOOD PLACE CL

Brief portraits of Mary Cassatt, Edith Wharton, Zelda Fitzgerald, Caresse Crosby, and Josephine Baker examine their lives in Paris

For the five American expatriate women profiled in Wiser's superb, sparkling group portrait, Paris was a social laboratory in which to lose or remake oneself. Mary Cassatt's fertile relationship with Degas gave way to her sour last years of exile in France, when she progressively lost her eyesight. Edith Wharton, cool-headed observer of society's ironies, flung herself into a dalliance with English journalist Morton Fullerton, who at the time was engaged to his first cousin, while Wharton neglected her own clinically depressed husband. Flapper Caresse Crosby shared the opium highs and sexual excesses of her poet husband Harry, then managed their Black Sun Press after his suicide. Daredevil Zelda Fitzgerald envied famous novelist husband F. Scott, who expropriated her mental breakdown as material for his fiction. Josephine Baker, illiterate teenage chorus girl from St. Louis, came closest to becoming a "changeling hybrid Parisienne." In marvelous vignettes, Wiser ( The Crazy Years ) creates an iridescent prism refracting the City of Light's special alchemy and ambiance. Photos.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Dipping into the apparently endless stream of expatriate-in- Paris literature, Wiser (The Circle Tour, 1988, etc.; English/Univ. of Denver) offers a tiresome rehash of the lives of five intriguing women, all of whom have been better served elsewhere. In a narrative that spans the years 1844 through 1975, Wiser profiles Impressionist artist Mary Cassatt, author Edith Wharton, avant-garde publisher Caresse Crosby, doomed wife Zelda Fitzgerald, and entertainer Josephine Baker; all five passed significant portions of their lives in Paris. Along the way, there are stale musings about the beauty and social freedom of the city, and the usual cast of Paris-memoir characters (Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Picasso, etc.). At the outset, Wiser explains that ``...I went looking for the common thread of connection to Paris, or to one another. There was no clear thread.'' The ensuing manuscript only emphasizes this point. There's no clear explanation of why these particular women should have their lives linked in one volume; no angle, apart from shared nationality and artistic leanings, to tie them together as subjects over whom Paris exerted a special pull. Cassatt arrived on her own, with grudging family approval. Wharton was fleeing a ``suffocating'' marriage. Crosby and Fitzgerald merely followed their husbands. Baker was lured from New York to star in a revue. Only Wharton and Crosby, sharing a common cousin, Walter Berry, had any sustained relationship, and a cold one at that. Four of the women liked dogs and couturier gowns, and three of them were buried in France. Not much there. Or here, for that matter. (Photographs--some seen.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In his latest work, the author of The Crazy Years: Paris in the Twenties (Thames & Hudson, 1990) portrays five American women who from pre-World War I through the mid-1930s spent the most significant period of their lives in Paris, searching for personal fulfillment in ways not possible in America. Criteria for inclusion is somewhat vague, with many well-known women omitted. Yet in the end the unique selection embraces Mary Cassatt, Edith Wharton, Caresse Crosby, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Josephine Baker, as well as the men in their lives and their respective literary, artistic, and social circles. Paris is the background for these interpretative, anecdotal sketches of seemingly unrelated lives, rendered with a novelist's skill. Although American expatriate life and the French cultural background are more thoroughly covered in numerous histories and biographies, e.g., Shari Benstock's Women of the Left Bank (Univ. of Texas Pr., 1986), this is a readable tale with strong human-interest appeal. Recommended.
- Lesley Jorbin, Cleveland State Univ. Lib.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.