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Angels Go Naked A Novel |
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Angels Go Naked A Novel |
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基本信息·出版社：The Perseus Books Group
·页码：304 页
·出版日期：2000年05月
·ISBN：1582430624
·条形码：9781582430621
·版本：第1版
·装帧：精装
·开本：16开 Pages Per Sheet
·外文书名：裸体天使
内容简介 Book DescriptionMargaret Rose is a talented but nervous violinist given to bouts of stage fright and unrequited love; Webster Hale is a biologist, who, on principle, refuses to kill animals in order to study them. In Angels Go Naked, a novel-in-stories, Cornelia Nixon follows this vexed love story and the collision course that they call their life together. Against all odds, they meet, fall in love, and marry. Margy begins to think about having a child, and it is here that Cornelia Nixon captures the troubled but deeply symbiotic union of a wife who says she desperately wants children and a husband who refuses to become a father. The course of their unhappiness, but one in which their connection is never in doubt, is the story of this novel of contemporary love and loss.
Angels Go Naked is the vexed love story of Webster, a microbiologist at Berkeley, Margy, a violinist for the Chicago Symphony, and the collision course they call their life together. Against all probability, they meet, fall in love, and marry. Margy begins to think about having a child, and it is here that Cornelia Nixon most brilliantly captures the troubled but deeply symbiotic union of a wife who says she desperately wants children and a husband who refuses to become a father. The arc of this couple's unhappiness is traced in a funny, sad, and compassionate series of beautifully imagined scenes. As in her celebrated novel Now You See It , Nixon's gifts are apparent on every page.
From Publishers WeeklyAlthough subtitled "a novel," Nixon's (Now You See It) delicately constructed new book is really a collection of 11 related short stories. Skillfully interwoven, they tell of violinist Margy Rose, from her adolescence in Boston through her stormy relationship with marine biologist and perpetual student Webster Unutshimakitshigamink, a name he adapted from the Algonquin because it means "he lives beside the sea." In Boston, Chicago and California's Bolinas Bay, these highly educated young people and their friends inhabit a milieu reminiscent of that in the novels of the late Laurie Colwin and of Catherine Schine, though Nixon's world is darker, lonelier. Margy, who has always been haunted by nightmares--including one about an abortion she had in college--begins to dream obsessively about having a child. Meanwhile, Webster, who is generally repulsed by people despite having a few friends, is obsessed with the degradation of the environment. Before meeting Margy, he swore off women; afterward, he strives for a life that, like his wedding, is without family or guests; briefly, it is without Margy, who leaves him when he won't give her the baby she desires. Nixon's clear and vivid prose is somewhat mocking, from her first story (where she pokes fun at the infatuation of Margy and her high-school friends for Freud and poetry) to her last (with its adroit one-sentence put-down of a callous medical specialist); like the breeze that Webster smells coming from Lake Michigan, the narrative has "a certain poisoned sweetness." Despite the author's ironic distance, however, Webster and Margy emerge as vivid characters who command affection and compassion; by the novel's conclusion, one can only hope they will find their way through the second half of their lives more joyfully than they traversed the first. (Apr.)
Kirkus ReviewsIn this elegant but disconcertingly episodic novel, a husband pessimistic about Earth's future resists his wife's pleas to commit to their union by having children. As in her first book, Now You See It (1991), Nixon examines her protagonists lives in a sequence of interrelated stories that cumulatively should compose a novel. The result, though, is an awkward hybrid that never fully illuminates the marriage of violinist Margy and microbiologist Webster. Individual chapters are too self-contained to satisfactorily cohere into a full-length whole. Characters appear once, like the school friends in Women Come and Go, then never return. The narrative hopscotches through the years ahead, leaving long stretches of time unaccounted for. In college, Margy sleeps with WASP Henry, but he breaks it off when she learns shes pregnant, and in A Solo Performance, Margy has an abortion. Cut to Season of Sensuality in Venice, where Margy is vacationing with a fellow member of the Chicago Symphony, trying to get over an affair with an abusive pianist. Next, in After the Beep, she spends a summer house-sitting in Bolinas, a coastal village in California where she meets Webster, who feels so passionately about Native Americans, the environment, and Caucasians depredations that he has taken an Indian name and given up ``white man's time, the telephone and news, hamburgers and pizza, everything that came in plastic.'' As he works on his dissertation, the two fall in love and marry; Webster moves to Chicago. Married life brings its usual conflicts: Webster finds Margy extravagant and wasteful, while she is often irked by his fanaticism (he wont even kill a housefly). But as Margy's biological clock ticks away, the biggest point of contention becomes Webster's refusal to have children. An ambitious portrait of a bittersweet contemporary marriage with a particularly contemporary problem, but the impact, unfortunately, is blunted by the elliptical format.
From Library JournalNixon, who has received the O. Henry Award and the Pushcart Prize, creates a "novel in stories" that cannot be put down. The stories are interwoven like a fine violin concerto, reminiscent of one that main character Margy performs at one of her concerts. We follow her from high school through college, an unwanted pregnancy, and on to being a violinist for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Her whole life seems disconnected until she meets Webster, a microbiologist at Berkeley, who seems to give Margy a purpose to her career and life. The novel resembles the perfect love story until the reader starts to see the failings of the characters as well as their perseverance in the hope that they'll get lucky and perhaps get it right. As the novel states, "Webster had already shoved the big door wide, onto the bright and empty corridor, trying to find his way." Nixon's writing gifts are apparent in every scene of the novel. A worthwhile purchase for most public libraries.
-Vicki Cecil, Hartford City P.L., IN
About AuthorCornelia Nixon lives in Berkeley, California. Two of the stories in this book received O. Henry Awards (one of them a first prize) and one was awarded a Pushcart Prize.
Book Dimension: length: (cm)24 width:(cm)14.8
媒体推荐 ...pleasingly modern...in a distinctive metaphoric prose that will keep you alert but never mystified. --
National Public Radio,Cornelia Nixon is an ace writer and a brilliantly perceptive chronicler of the irregular heartbeat of human relationships. --
Newsday, April 30, 2000 by Tom GogolaNixon's great achievement in
Angels Go Naked is in transforming the ordinary events of Margy and Webster's daily existence into exquisite dramas. --
The New York Times Book Review, Beverly Gologorsky 专业书评 Although subtitled "a novel," Nixon's (Now You See It) delicately constructed new book is really a collection of 11 related short stories. Skillfully interwoven, they tell of violinist Margy Rose, from her adolescence in Boston through her stormy relationship with marine biologist and perpetual student Webster Unutshimakitshigamink, a name he adapted from the Algonquin because it means "he lives beside the sea." In Boston, Chicago and California's Bolinas Bay, these highly educated young people and their friends inhabit a milieu reminiscent of that in the novels of the late Laurie Colwin and of Catherine Schine, though Nixon's world is darker, lonelier. Margy, who has always been haunted by nightmares--including one about an abortion she had in college--begins to dream obsessively about having a child. Meanwhile, Webster, who is generally repulsed by people despite having a few friends, is obsessed with the degradation of the environment. Before meeting Margy, he swore off women; afterward, he strives for a life that, like his wedding, is without family or guests; briefly, it is without Margy, who leaves him when he won't give her the baby she desires. Nixon's clear and vivid prose is somewhat mocking, from her first story (where she pokes fun at the infatuation of Margy and her high-school friends for Freud and poetry) to her last (with its adroit one-sentence put-down of a callous medical specialist); like the breeze that Webster smells coming from Lake Michigan, the narrative has "a certain poisoned sweetness." Despite the author's ironic distance, however, Webster and Margy emerge as vivid characters who command affection and compassion; by the novel's conclusion, one can only hope they will find their way through the second half of their lives more joyfully than they traversed the first. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
