PEN/Faulkner Award

The PEN/Faulkner Award was given last week to Kate Christensen, author of The Great Man.

Find this book in our catalog.

Jacket Notes:
Christensen pens a scintillating comedy of life among the avant-garde--of the untidy truths, needy egos, and jostling for position behind the glossy facadeof artistic greatness--in this story of a New York City painter living in theheroic generation of the 1940s and 1950s.
REVIEW: Publisher's Weekly 05/21/2007
This penetratingly observed novel is less about the great man of its title than the women Oscar Feldman, fictional 20th-century New York figurative painter (and an infamous seducer of models as well as a neglectful father), leaned on and left behind: Abigail, his wife of more than four decades; Teddy, his mistress of nearly as many years; and Maxine, his sister, an abstract artist who has achieved her own lesser measure of fame. Five years after Feldman's death, as the women begin sketching their versions of him for a pair of admiring young biographers working on very different accounts of his life, long-buried resentments corrode their protectiveness, setting the stage for secrets to be spilled and bonds to be tested. Christensen (The Epicure's Lament ) tells the story with striking compassion and grace, and her characters are fully alive and frankly sexual creatures. Distraction intrudes when real-world details are wrong (the A-train, for instance, doesn't run through the Bronx), and the novel's bookends-an obituary and a book review, both ostensibly from the New York Times -are less than convincing as artifacts. In all, however, this is an eloquent story posing questions to which there are no simple answers: what is love? what is family? what is art?

Other books in the library by Kate Christensen:

The Epicure's Lament. Published 2004 by Doubleday Books Find this book in our catalog.

In the Drink. Published 1999 by Doubleday Books Find this book in our catalog.

An article in the anthology: The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth about Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage by Cathi Hanauer. Published 2002 by William Morrow & Company Find this book in our catalog.

Find out more about Kate Christensen and the PEN/Faulkner Award