Little Fugue
A Novel
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- $3.99
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
Acclaimed short-story writer and winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award, Robert Anderson has written a brilliantly inventive first novel–a book that blends the facts of a famous writer’s life with the profound effect of her death on an entire generation.
Sylvia Plath’s legacy inspires, harrows, and haunts the three people at the center of Little Fugue: her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, freed by her death and then imprisoned by her myth; Assia Gutmann Wevill, Plath’s rival and Hughes’s mistress, who kills herself only six years after Plath; and Robert Anderson, a young New York writer, who is obsessed with Plath’s poems and her suicide, which “forged my identity and, incidentally, ruined my life.”
Their lives intersect, transiently and directly, through some of the more dramatic social upheavals of the past decades: the ’68 student riots, the drug-addled seventies, the AIDS crisis of the eighties, the cataclysm of 9/11.
Little Fugue crackles with wit and verbal dexterity. There have been many accounts of the Plath/Hughes drama, but author Robert Anderson provides a fresh, utterly convincing interpretation of events. This is a brilliant novel of artists caught between the erotic allure of extinction and the eternal power of poetry.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Plath/Hughes story has been told and retold almost to death, but Flannery O'Connor Award winner Anderson (The Ice Age) breathes brash new life into the iconic tale in this hypnotic and provocative novel. Anderson chronicles the aftermath of Plath's 1963 suicide from the perspective of real and fictional characters, notably Columbia-educated fiction writer Robert Anderson, who is forever changed by reading the Ariel poems. To him, Plath is untouchable, the sacrificial Joan of Arc. His Plath-infused account of social and political turmoil in New York from the Columbia riots of 1968 to September 11, 2001, is counterpointed by the story of Ted Hughes and his mistress, Assia Gutmann Wevill. Although Anderson makes it keenly obvious that he favors Plath, and he will ruffle plenty of feathers with his blunt partisanship ("What a bleak, anticlimactic, eschatological PR caper that Birthday Letters charade made for.... Ted made his last buck"), Ted is artfully portrayed as a man who felt he never really knew his wife. Assia, meanwhile, is the half-good poet who covets Plath's identity and ends up sharing her fate. Anderson's writing is electric, irreverent and erudite. The novel's only flaw is the erratic fugue between the masterful Plath/Assia/Ted passages and the sometimes convoluted Robert sections; Robert as character is occasionally subsumed by the character of New York, and the fundamental connection between Plath and her young acolyte is lost. Still, this is a fiercely imaginative effort, in which Anderson connects the intricate psychology of his characters with their art and the world around them.
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