Following her National Book Award finalist, Evidence of Things Unseen, Marianne Wiggins turns her extraordinary literary imagination to the American West, where the life of legendary photographer Edward S. Curtis is the basis for a resonant exploration of history and family, landscape and legacy.
The Shadow Catcher dramatically inhabits the space where past and present intersect, seamlessly interweaving narratives from two different eras: the first fraught passion between turn-of-the-twentieth-century icon Edward Curtis (1868-1952) and his muse-wife, Clara; and a twenty-first-century journey of redemption.
Narrated in the first person by a reimagined writer named Marianne Wiggins, the novel begins in Hollywood, where top producers are eager to sentimentalize the complicated life of Edward Curtis as a sunny biopic: "It's got the outdoors. It's got adventure. It's got the do-good element." Yet, contrary to Curtis's esteemed public reputation as servant to his nation, the artist was an absent husband and disappearing father. Jump to the next generation, when Marianne's own father, John Wiggins (1920-1970), would live and die in equal thrall to the impulse of wanderlust.
Were the two men running from or running to? Dodging the false beacons of memory and legend, Marianne amasses disparate clues -- photographs and hospital records, newspaper clippings and a rare white turquoise bracelet -- to recover those moments that went unrecorded, "to hear the words only the silent ones can speak." The Shadow Catcher, fueled by the great American passions for love and land and family, chases the silhouettes of our collective history into the bright light of the present.
well-written--anyone interested in the life of Edward Curtis will find this "fiction" an absorbing read.
writes,
Curtis is one of my favorite photographers, and I bought this book solely on that criterium. What a delight, after setting it aside for a few months, to pick it up and realize it was so much more interesting than I expected, that I read it in a morning. Beautifully crafted and wonderfully descriptively worded -- what a pleasure.
writes,
It is hard to know where to begin praise for this book, there are so many different mysteries to be solved. Wiggins has managed to incorporate themes of race, identity, holocaust, personal freedom, responsibility, and has even added touches of humor that make the reader laugh out loud. There was a section that almost made me put the book down, where it slid dangerously close to romance novel, but remembering the early, contemporary scenes that so thoroughly engaged me, I kept at it, and was very very glad I had. That section was weak for a reason, which although not spelled out, became apparent in the resolution.
