Lee & Elaine (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)

Ann Rower’s forgotten turn-of-the-millennium classic that looks at the lives of Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning with obsessed, louche brilliance.

Maybe it was the car, the dangerous thrill of driving around, fast. I’m from the suburbs. I love driving, especially a red car, even a rental. Nothing is really mine. Maybe that’s what I love. Is that sick? I skidded a little, taking a turn too quick, looking at the water not the road. I knew the roads weren’t that safe. There had been many famous accidents out here. I almost did a Jackson—Jackson Pollock’s drunk car tree Saturday night death on this same road. But I was struggling to eat a muffin, not slugging from a pint like he must have been, while juggling his scared girlfriend and her terrified friend.

Separating from her long-term partner Jack and beginning a passionate affair with a much younger female student, the narrator of Lee and Elaine takes time off to write. Leaving Manhattan for an off-season Springs, East Hampton rental and haunting the Green River Cemetery where artistic giants of the mid-twentieth century are buried, she becomes obsessed with the lives and friendship of Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning, who were both artists and the wives of famous men. They were always so peripheral, she writes. Suddenly I wanted to find out about these women. Find them, period.

First published by Serpent’s Tail’s in 2002, the novel was republished as an ebook in 2013 by Emily Books. Written with Rower’s trademark louche and brilliant, mouthy, and deceptively casual style, it remains a forgotten classic of the turn of the millennium. With piercing and hilarious straightforwardness, the narrator turns the process of unearthing art-world gossip and tearing down her own life’s substructure into a searching and original examination of sexuality and friendship, art and ambition.

Ann Rower has always lived, worked, and written in and around New York City. She is the author of If You’re A Girl, Armed Response, and Lee & Elaine. She has collaborated as a writer with the Wooster Group, and taught writing for decades at the School of Visual Arts.