The Taos Truth Game
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
When Myron Brinig arrived in Taos in 1933, he thought he was just passing through on his way to a screenwriting job in Hollywood. But Brinig fell in love--with the landscape, the burgeoning art colony that centered around Mabel Dodge Luhan, and especially with Cady Wells, a talented young painter who had left his wealthy family in the East to settle in Taos. Brinig remained in the West off and on for the next twenty years.
Earl Ganz centers this entertaining novel on Brinig's conflicted relationships with Taos and its denizens. Myron Brinig, a completely forgotten writer, is brought back to center stage, along with many of the people who made Taos the epicenter of the utopian avant garde in America between the world wars. Among the cast of characters are Frieda Lawrence, Robinson and Una Jeffers, and Frank Waters, with cameo appearances by Gertrude Stein and Henry Roth.
"The Taos Truth Game reminds us that Americans have historically romped through the surprisingly wide open recreational reserves of marriage, sexuality, and friendship. Mr. Ganz exposes the daily drama of life in Mabel Dodge Luhan's orbit, and offers a rare look at our queer heritage in the American West that goes beyond the usual footnote or erasure. By weaving this pastiche from a forgotten novelist's memoirs, Mr. Ganz delightfully resurrects the truth game and invites us to play a hand."--Karl Olson, PRIDE Inc., Montana's LGBT advocacy organization
"Earl Ganz pulls off the impossible trick. He raises the famous dead and restores them not just to animated life, but to the full psychological and spiritual life of the living. The Taos Truth Game is a major literary achievement. How Ganz manages to do this is one of fiction writing's enduring and humbling mysteries. This book will have a wide and enthusiastic audience, starting with me."--Rick DeMarinis, author of Apocalypse
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A historically intriguing, fancifully packed debut by writing professor Ganz imagines the largely forgotten life and work of gay Jewish novelist Myron Brinig (1896 1991), who landed among the gossipy, insular set of Taos, N.Mex., artists during the mid-1930s. Brinig was a native of Butte, Mont., and author of Singermann and Wide Open Town, among numerous other briefly popular pioneer novels. Arriving at Taos, he is swept into the orbit of reigning dowager Mabel Dodge Luhan via the painter Cady Wells, who introduces him to Mabel and to all the big guns in their circle (painters Andrew Dasburg and Leon Gaspard; writers Frieda Lawrence, Witter Bynner and even Gertrude Stein) in a series of preposterous cameos. The plot, such as it is, concerns one name-dropping visit after another, especially chez bored socialite Mabel at her famous adobe dwelling, Big House, where she forces her guests to play the Truth Game, answering personal questions no matter how embarrassing. Ganz, having faithfully done his homework, tries to render true these inimitable personalities. His work, however, is notable for resurrecting novelist Brinig, who went on to write 21 novels, the last in 1958, before falling out of print.
