The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Green Hour, by Frederic Tuten
reviewed by Philip Landon

Frederic Tuten. The Green Hour. Norton, 2002. 265 pp. $24.95.

Frederic Tuten has already given us an ultra-experimental collage-novel (The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, 1971), a telescoped historical biography (Tallien: A Brief Romance, 1988), a political novel populated by comic-book characters (Tintin in the New World, 1993), and a time-warp tribute to an iconic artist (Van Gogh’s Bad Café, 1997)—an acrobatic oeuvre by any standard. The Green Hour, Tuten’s most conventional book to date, is written without recourse to the jaw-dropping juxtapositions that give such piquancy to the earlier work. It is a love story narrated in the third person from the viewpoint of a female protagonist, Dominique, an American art-historian who has shifted focus from the nightmare world of Goya to the neoclassical idealism of Poussin, and who is unable to choose between two lovers: the lefty vagabond, political activist, and bohemian Rex (all passion, no commitment) and the cultivated entrepreneur Eric (millionaire, much more sensible choice). Wealth, Tuten reminds us, is the prerequisite of the artistic high. “[Money] lifted you like a balloon above the earth, where human sadness and its blighted landscape vanished, leaving visible from that height and silence only the earth’s ravishing contours, shapes, colors and forms.” This novel will tickle academics on either side of the gulf of incomprehension that separates graying “formalists” from politically engaged new-model scholars. It is also a brave exercise in character imagination, strong on the psychological nuances of infatuation. Even as Tuten employs mellow narrative techniques to evoke, for once, his own time and milieu (New York academia, with sojourns in Paris and Madrid), he keeps sinuous faith with his key concern: the necessity of art. A novel by Frederic Tuten is always an event and a new departure.