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WORK TITLE: The Spirit Photographer
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1971
WEBSITE: http://www.jmvarese.com/
CITY: Hudson Valley
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2018059807
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2018059807
HEADING: Varese, Jon Michael
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670 __ |a Varese, J. The spirit photographer, 2018: |b title page (Jon Michael Varese) page 3 of jacket (Jon Michael Varese; development of the British novel in the nineteenth century; Director of Public Outreach for The Dickens Project, a multi-campus research consortium at the University of California; has lectured and written widely on nineteenth-century literature; his work in nineteenth-century American history; his first novel)
PERSONAL
Born 1971, in Miami, FL.
EDUCATION:Swarthmore College, B.A.; University of California, Santa Cruz, M.A., Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author. The Dickens Project, Director of Public Outreach. Neighborhood Academic Initiative, University of Southern California, guest teacher.
WRITINGS
Also contributor to San Francisco Chronicle and Guardian Online.
SIDELIGHTS
Throughout his professional career, Jon Michael Varese has mainly contributed to the world of academia. His subject of expertise is literature, which he studied all throughout his undergraduate and postgraduate education at Swarthmore College and the University of California, respectively. He also serves as the Director of Public Outreach for the Dickens Project. Varese has released numerous pieces of writing—both fiction and nonfiction—throughout his career; some of his work can be found in such publications as the San Francisco Chronicle. In the year 2012, he published a more modernized version of the classic novel, Great Expectations.
Varese’s debut novel, The Spirit Photographer, centers on a quartet of protagonists: Isabelle, Joseph, Edward, and James. For many years, Edward has made a living for himself as a charlatan of a photographer, who claims he has the ability to photograph the souls of the dead. He aims his services toward families still grieving the sons and husbands they lost during the Civil War. What Edward doesn’t expect is for his work to suddenly become a touch more personal.
One day, he is hired by a family known as the Garretts, headed by James, who commission Edward for their portrait with the goal of hopefully catching the visage of their late adult son among them. Yet once the photos develop, Edward finds that it isn’t the dead Garrett family member sitting with his still-living relatives, but a woman by the name of Isabelle. After fleeing from slavery, Isabelle managed to escape to freedom long ago; what’s more is Edward not only was a friend of hers, but had harbored romantic feelings towards her. She had also touched the lives of not only James, but Joseph, a black man who now works with Edward. Together, Joseph and Edward decide to look into why and how Isabelle has come to them through this photograph, and what she may be trying to communicate to them. Booklist contributor Stacy Shaw wrote: “An entertaining amalgam of history and fiction, gothic and ghost story, The Spirit Photographer is an addicting tale.” In Kirkus Reviews, a writer remarked: “The writing is vivid, even lyrical at times, and the passages on Reconstruction–encapsulated in the prickly friendship between Garrett and the more conservative Sen. Dovehouse–are illuminating.” Ruth Li, a reviewer on the PopMatters website, wrote: “Atmospheric, lyrical, and poignant, the novel deftly interweaves strands of history and fantasy, peering into several characters’ subjective perspectives in a gradual unfolding of revelation and retribution.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 1, 2018, Stacy Shaw, review of The Spirit Photographer, p. 29.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2018, review of The Spirit Photographer.
ONLINE
John Michael Varese website, http://www.jmvarese.com/ (July 15, 2018), author profile.
PopMatters, https://www.popmatters.com/ (May 4, 2018), Ruth Li, “Of Bodies and Souls: Representing the Historically Marginalized in ‘The Spirit Photographer,'” review of The Spirit Photographer.
Times Free Press, http://www.timesfreepress.com/ (May 15, 2018), Susan Pierce, “Q&A: Author Jon Michael Varese to sign his new book Saturday at Star Line Books,” author interview.
Biography
JonJon spent most of his childhood reading books under his grandmother's mango tree. Born in Miami, Florida in 1971, he later graduated from Swarthmore College with a B.A. in English Literature, and went on to earn his M.A. and Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California at Santa Cruz. In addition to pursuing his academic work, he wrote fiction in both college and graduate school.
For more than two decades, Jon has been affiliated with The Dickens Project, a multi-campus research consortium of the University of California, and in 2016 became the Project’s Director of Public Outreach. As Director, he guest teaches for the University of Southern California's Neighborhood Academic Initiative (NAI), a college pipeline program for students from Title 1 schools in South Central Los Angeles.
Jon has written and lectured extensively on 19th-century literature for several outlets, including the Guardian Online, San Francisco Chronicle, Oxford University Press, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His edition of Dickens's Great Expectations, geared toward a new generation of readers for this novel, was published under the Signature imprint of Barnes & Noble in 2012.
Jon's long-standing interest in American History goes all the way back to the first paper he ever delivered as a graduate student on the American Civil War diarist Mary Chesnut. His first published novel, The Spirit Photographer (2018), is a story that evolved from his work on 19th-century America.
He lives in the Hudson Valley.
Q&A: Author Jon Michael Varese to sign his new book Saturday at Star Line Books
May 15th, 2018by Susan Pierce in Life EntertainmentRead Time: 4 mins.
Blurring the line between Southern gothic and an old-fashioned ghost story, Jon Michael Varese presents his debut novel, "The Spirit Photographer," a haunting tale of romance, revenge and regret.
Varese ("rhymes with messy," Varese jokes) will be at Star Line Books on Saturday for a reading and signing of "The Spirit Photographer."
Author Jon Michael Varese will be in Chattanooga...
Photo by Contributed Photo /Times Free Press.
If you go
› What: Jon Michael Varese reading and book signing
› Where: Star Line Books, 1467 Market St,
› When: 5 p.m. Saturday, May 19
› Admission: Free
› For more information: 423-777-5629
"The Spirit Photographer" by Jon Michael Varese
Photo by Contributed Photo /Times Free Press.
In this book, Boston con man and entrepreneur Edward Moody has created a thriving business as a "spirit photographer." In the post-Civil War years, grieving wives and parents sit for him in hopes an image of their loved one will appear in their portrait — reuniting them with their deceased soldier.
But to Moody's surprise, when abolitionist Sen. James Garrett and wife sit for a portrait in hopes of seeing their son, the image of an escaped slave whom Moody loved, Isabelle, actually does appear on the negative. Isabelle's image also has great significance to the Garretts as well as to Joseph Winter, a veteran of the 5th Massachusetts Colored Cavalry who is now Moody's assistant.
Moody believes Isabelle is sending him a message, and he begins to unravel the mystery of what happened to her once he left for the war. He and Winter search for clues to Isabelle's past, which leads them to Louisiana, where slave hunters, a voodoo priestess and a crazed plantation mistress help and hinder them from learning the truth.
ADVERTISING
The horrifying mystery behind the spirit photo will hold readers' attention and their imaginations to the last page.
"I'm fascinated by the premise of the book and thought 'I want him in here,'" says Star Lowe, owner of Star Line Books.
Varese discussed his novel, which took six years to complete, in a recent phone interview.
Q: Instead of the traditional love triangle, you used a rectangle: Isabelle and the three men who loved her. Why?
A: I don't think it's so much that I chose the rectangle; the rectangle chose me. My background is in 19th-century British literature. I had not spent a lot of time in 19th-century America, other than the work of Dickens.
Once I started to engage with the late 19th century, what I found was I could not take one step without bumping into slavery in some form. As a historian, I couldn't ignore that. So that topic began making its way into the development of the story. That's where the idea of Isabelle came up.
I call it a quartet: Moody is the viola, the Garretts are the violins and Joseph is the cello.
Q: Your specialty is 19th-century British literature, so how much did you know about voodoo, atrocities of slavery, Louisiana bayous?
A: I grew up in South Florida. I have a Southern sensibility that's also informed by the internationalization of Miami. The legacy of slavery was not in my face in South Florida, as much as it would have been for someone who grew up in other Southern states.
I spent a lot of time in the swamps of Louisiana while writing the book. There's no substitute for going to the place. You need to stand on the banks of the Mississippi River to get a sense of what steamboat travel would have been like during that time.
Q: So how does a guy from South Florida get interested in 19th-century British literature?
A: I had a relatively lonely childhood. I found reading through the parent of a close friend of mine. She was a great reader of all things, and she was like a surrogate mother to me. She gave me a copy of Dickens' "Pickwick Papers" when I was 14, and that was the start of everything.
Q: The female characters in "The Spirit Photographer" are strong, outspoken women who don't hide behind their men. That's not the traditional manner most books give antebellum women.
A: That's because that's how history has written them. The literature of the lost cause has written "the virtuous plantation mistress." Women were not immune to the toxic effects of slavery and all that it touched. Especially Elizabeth Garrett with her conflicted history of being tied to a Southern family, but she's from Philadelphia.
Q: The ending seems to be left to reader interpretation, but did you intend the moral of the story to be learned from the past?
A: Everyone loves to read the story of the character who goes through change and becomes something they weren't in the beginning. It wasn't so much that idea that interested me in terms of who Moody becomes. Yes, he goes through transformation that is psychological, emotional and even spiritual. But at the end, he still shows self-absorption. It's the delusion of his own self-importance he never quite escapes.
What interested me more is the imperfection of all members of the quartet. While all the characters have some redeeming qualities, who likes a character who is cut and dry? The most interesting characters in literature are those who are not cut and dry, and I wanted to make all of them like that.
None of it is black and white; none of it is easy to interpret. The greatest metaphor of the book is exactly that: You just don't know if it's real or if it's not.
Contact Susan Pierce at spierce@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6284.
Print Marked Items
The Spirit Photographer
Stacy Shaw
Booklist.
114.13 (Mar. 1, 2018): p29+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* The Spirit Photographer. By Jon Michael Varese. Apr. 2018.320p. Overlook, $26.95 (9781468315875).
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Boston photographer Edward Moody makes a living by reuniting the grief-stricken with their lost loved ones in
"spirit photos." Having built up an impressive clientele, Moody next sets his sights on famed Senator Garrett and his wife, who lost their young
son. But something goes wrong during their sitting, and the spirit in their photo seems there for Moody instead. It's Isabelle, the love of his life
and a freed black woman, who disappeared, leaving only a letter promising to return. Even more bewildering is the reaction of the Garretts, who
seem equally haunted. Now Moody must retrace Isabelle's past with the help of his new assistant, Joseph, who, mysteriously, also knew her. In
between the overlapping lives that Isabelle touched lies danger, and Moody and Joseph must face their own demons to find the woman who saved
them. Varese's unique first novel is set deep in the secrets of the postwar years, when the chains of slavery have vanished but a sinister underside
to society remains. An entertaining amalgam of history and fiction, gothic and ghost story, The Spirit Photographer is an addicting tale.--Stacy
Shaw
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Shaw, Stacy. "The Spirit Photographer." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2018, p. 29+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532250870/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=14b8a2d4. Accessed 1 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532250870
Varese, Jon Michael: THE SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHER
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Varese, Jon Michael THE SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHER Overlook (Adult Fiction) $26.95 4, 17 ISBN: 978-1-4683-1587-5
A sprawling, intricately plotted debut novel that combines post-Civil War history with a kind of ghost story.
The title character is one Edward Moody ((based on a real man named William Mumler), who worked for Civil War photographer Mathew Brady.
Moody was devastated by the horrors he witnessed, and after the war he takes up spirit photography with great success. Clients sit for a photo
portrait in Moody's Boston studio, and when the negative is developed, the image of a departed loved one somehow emerges in the background.
Sen. James Garrett, a prominent abolitionist, reluctantly accompanies his wife, Elizabeth, for a sitting: She hopes to make a spiritual connection
with their son, who died years before at age 3. But--shockingly--the image that surfaces behind the Garretts is that of a young woman of color
named Isabelle, who, it turns out, was involved with both Moody and the senator. Moody is determined to find out what happened to Isabelle and
launches a search; he is accompanied by Joseph Winter, an escaped slave-cum-Union Army veteran who has become his assistant and who also
knew Isabelle. With the police on their heels--Moody is accused of being a charlatan--the two end up in the Louisiana bayou, where they begin to
learn the truth about Isabelle and what she left behind. The writing is vivid, even lyrical at times, and the passages on Reconstruction--
encapsulated in the prickly friendship between Garrett and the more conservative Sen. Dovehouse--are illuminating. The deep divide in the
country circa 1870 is vaguely reminiscent of our own time. But the novel overheats, especially in the endless bayou section, and there are a few
too many mystics and mediums on hand. Plus, the endless twists and turns become wearing.
In part a meditation on belief, the book is mostly engaging despite being overlong and occasionally preposterous.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Varese, Jon Michael: THE SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHER." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527248234/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5cba4164. Accessed 1 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527248234
Of Bodies and Souls: Representing the Historically Marginalized in 'The Spirit Photographer'
RUTH LI 04 May 2018
IN JON MICHAEL VARESE'S LATEST, EXPOSURE AND CONCEALMENT INTERWEAVE INTO AN INTRICATE TAPESTRY OF INTERCONNECTED MOTIVATIONS AND INTENTIONS.
THE SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHER
JON MICHAEL VARESE
Overlook
Apr 2018
In The Spirit Photographer by Jon Michael Varese, spirits lurk in the memory, as does the scarcely buried history of slavery. Atmospheric, lyrical, and poignant, the novel deftly interweaves strands of history and fantasy, peering into several characters' subjective perspectives in a gradual unfolding of revelation and retribution.
Like its subject, the book is a material artifact with spiritual intentions. Interspersed in its pages are fictional newspaper and newsletter articles, letters, and interviews, which emerge as intriguing instances of literature within literature. That the text fuses journalistic, dialogic, and narrative accounts, it at times renders more akin to an ethnographic study or a legal investigation than a novel. This is seen in its approaches and methods to the observation of the human psyche, in its Agatha Christie-like questionings of crimes to which the solutions are in many ways already known, in its explications of spirit mediumship and Reconstruction-era politics.
The 'primary source' materials -- fragments and correspondences -- expose yet more layers of thematic meaning beneath the main narrative, even as the apparitions of spirits imbue hidden overlays upon the photographs, the simultaneous superimpositions creating an intricate interplay between textual and thematic layering. Form intertwines with function as multiple levels of reality and representation blur the lines between fact and fiction, authenticity and artifice, subjectivity and objectivity, truth and deception. These features are found in the narrative voice, the characters' perspectives, the 'published' pieces; juxtaposed with the real photographs, the fraudulent spirit images, and the "real" ghost image.
In the spaces of photographic negatives, new insights can be revealed. In a sense, the story emerges as a study of contrasts cast into relief, between Elizabeth and James Garrett, Edward Moody and Joseph Winter, north and south, public and private, individual and societal, darkness and light, spirituality and materiality, freedom and slavery, abolitionists and conservatives, decency and deception, morality and immorality. Only in peering at one can we truly perceive the other, with its flaws and complexities, passions and anxieties, that expose the human image.
Exposure and concealment interweave into an intricate tapestry of interconnected motivations and intentions. Isabelle, a deceased daughter of a former slave, is the connecting thread that traverses each character's story. Her elegy threads through the narrative, her absence emerging as an uncannily sensed presence; she is the conscience, the heartbeat that drives the quickening action. The revelation of her secret renders possible the others' redemption. In relating each tale in turn, the novel tells us that life is but a forgetting, to which only the spirits of the departed give remembrance.
In the keen psychological introspection emerges the liminal spaces between imagination and reality, between a longing and its fulfillment. The word 'imagination' finds its roots in 'image', as conjuring an image in the mind becomes an act of imagining. Yet the visual imagery in the novel is not innocuous but imbued with significance. In particular, the 'darkness', the storms, the winds that pervade and permeate the pages, prove problematic: the association of darkness with evil and foreboding transcends degrees of skin tone to the entrenched nature of color symbolism as associated with race. In the light and dark imagery, even for the black Isabelle, it is her lightness that illuminates her beauty, moral goodness, and spiritual purity: " … there is a shock of light… the crystalline reflections off the water almost blind him, and amidst those diamond-like flashes, she stands". In contrast, the darkness of her hair accentuates physical beauty that assumedly awakens desire: "And her head is uncovered, her black hair loose and rippling over her shoulders, as undulous as the cane fronds themselves."
Yet the rendering of such scenes as more seduction than sin proves particularly problematic. Without inhabiting Isabelle's inner identity, we do not know her intentions and motivations. Even in her fragmented speech, she is not given a voice, an assertion or articulation, a disposition, an inner life, until she is heard in Joseph's memory. For each of the men, she is merely his "spirit", she "belonged" to him, she "was his" -- these are conquerings which, in their invisible insistence, prove far worse than the chains of chattel slavery. Moody succumbs to his own temptations; he loves Isabelle for her surfaces, not her depths. Yet the pulses of power and pleasure rob women of livelihood, of personhood, of belonging, of being.
In a painful irony, the 'spirit' of the story is turned into an idealized, illusory figure -- a body -- embodiment in the semblance of spiritualism. Without subverting its depictions, the narration casts Isabelle as the Other -- as inherently unknowable yet simple, shrouded in an aura of mystery by her "quiet defiance", "her unreadable stance… luminously transparent." Significantly, the narrative as told through Moody's viewpoint describes Isabelle as a "mirrored reflection of herself", yet in contrast to this statement, it seems as though she is merely a reflection of his views of her, mirrored through his subjective, distorted, incomplete lens, not her own. Even the southern landscape is described as "possess[ing] secret knowledge", inhabiting the space of an unfathomable Other removed from northern civilization. As Henriette sagely states, "She belonged to everyone -- to all of us. Her voice was the voice of all of us." But more importantly, she belongs to herself.
Granted, considering its photographic subject, the metaphors are aptly visual, as Pip's "You are in every line I have ever read" is transformed into Moody's "She was, in a sense, in every picture he ever took." Yet the portrait of Isabelle seems to elude a nuanced reading or interpretation of her subjectivity. A character who cannot 'read' another must give her a room of her own in which to write. To unravel the psychology and intentionality of a character is not a plot point, but a prerequisite. To enhance its impact, the narration needs to explicitly critique this dehumanization of women and cast violation as a vital wrongdoing greater in action and consequence than mere misconduct; its masking as romance is more sinister than Dovehouse's exaggerated racism.
From this vantage point, a radical, postcolonial, feminist re-envisioning could extend Gilbert and Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic (Yale University Press, 1979) to the context of the American Reconstruction period, supplanting the various Rochesters in this text -- Edward especially -- with Isabelle in the role of Antoinette. To reverse the gender roles -- for Estella to describe Pip through her eyes, for Scarlett to probe Rhett's psyche, for two women to search for a handsome, yet mysterious man they once loved, to uncover his unreadable intentions -- would seem strange, yet strangely liberating.
To problematize the pervasiveness of the male gaze, particularly of white males toward women of color, of historical oppressors to the oppressed, is a direction toward which we must strive. Moody is put on a trial for his crime of deceit but does not truly atone for a crueler and more insidious crime. Similarly, Garrett's acuity about the race problem arises at the societal, not the individual level. He, unlike the other senators, has the foresight to support the free labor of emancipated slaves but his treatment of women belies this broader benevolence. For the three men, a glimmer of moral restitution is scarcely deserved; the moments of regret are told rather than shown or felt.
Given the inextricably intertwined nature of the sexual and the political, and the intersecting ideologies of race, gender, and class, it's vital to reclaim identity, power, and dignity to the voices, beyond the images, of the once enslaved, in order to manifest their and our liberation and agency. Only then can we begin to give (re)birth to a nation dismantled of injustice and rooted in justice, to cast better shadows of the past upon the looming future.
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