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WORK TITLE: The Shades
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1962
WEBSITE:
CITY: Los Angeles
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married (husband an actor).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
As a screenwriter, the daughter of a professional concert pianist and a prominent (and aristocratic) comic novelist, and the wife of an actor, Evgenia Citkowitz has a family tradition that spans several different genres of the arts. Her first collection is Ether: Seven Stories and a Novella. “To say that Citkowitz comes from a background steeped in the arts is putting it mildly,” explained Heller McAlpin in the Christian Science Monitor. “Yet, with the notable exception of the title novella, which concerns a blocked writer who marries a Hollywood star and secretly mines their life for material, Citkowitz mainly steers clear of show business, writers, art, and, it appears, her high-profile autobiography. Citkowitz’s strength is social criticism, and she captures tensions and pretensions with killer details.”
Ether
The stories in Ether trace a variety of characters through points in their lives where they face moral crises. A lawyer discovers that the antique table he bought was a bargain because of an error made by the salesperson at the shop where he made the purchase. A foster mother who has been ostracized by her social circle because of the young boy for whom she is caring has to face her own feelings when she discovers a vagrant who has taken shelter in her yard. A mediocre writer leaves his editor-mistress in New York and moves to Los Angeles, where he begins a relationship with a budding actress—but he finds that he can only write stories about their lives together.
“Citkowitz,” said a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “maps the territory where false starts and disappointment sometimes lead to unexpected opportunities in her debut collection.” In Ether, concluded Booklist reviewer Leah Strauss, “Citkowitz deftly balances the rawer emotions of life–resentment, desire, humiliation–with a crafted, clever tone.”
The Shades
In The Shades, Citkowitz looks at the dissolution of a British family following a tragic accident in which a couple’s daughter is killed. The girl’s mother, “Catherine, remains in the family’s second home in Kent,” stated a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “disengaged from life and her work as a successful art gallery owner.” Her father retreats to London, where he tries to lose himself in his work. “I can relate to being motivated to write from fear,” Citkowitz told Vogue interviewer Chloe Schama. “In The Shades I wanted to explore what it means to be a parent in an uncertain world, the anxiety of it, and the barriers that we construct to keep the reality of that at bay. My novel is what happens when a family is slammed and their protective cocoon destroyed. As parents we are invested in the idea of nurture and believe that if we give our children the best, and provide every support, we will have succeeded. There’s beauty in that, [in] the love, work, sacrifice, and care.” Citkowitz’s “characters and setting make this addictive to read,” said Kate Gray in Xpress Reviews, “with twists that will have readers going back to savor details.”
Critics found Citkowitz’s debut novel a fascinating study of character and the varied reactions to sudden tragedy. The Shades “is driven less by the naked plot than by the exquisite strength of Citkowitz’s writing–spare, arresting, and emotionally precise,” wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor. “A thoroughly modern novel with a Gothic feel.” “Citkowitz suggests … the dead are, indeed, no longer for the living,” declared Scott Cheshire in the Los Angeles Times, “even while testing and re-imagining the original myth. There is the idea that the dead never do wholly cross, staying on in memory, shaping our projections, paranoias, desires and dreams. But most visionary is the subtle intimation that possibly all of us are shades, to some extent, that we travel with the dead, sharing one river, on the very same water, and not just after we fall. Brilliantly constructed, ‘The Shades’ is ghostly and alive, cerebral and sensuous, an absolutely riveting read.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 15, 2010, Leah Strauss, review of Ether: Seven Stories and a Novella, p. 26.
Christian Science Monitor, April 23, 2010, Heller McAlpin, review of Ether.
Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2018, review of The Shades.
Los Angeles Times, July 18, 2018, Scott Cheshire, “In ‘The Shades,’ a Family Is Haunted by Their Daughter’s Death.”
Publishers Weekly, March 15, 2010, review of Ether, p. 36; May 14, 2018, review of The Shades, p. 34.
Vogue, June 20, 2018, Chloe Schama, “Evgenia Citkowitz’s New Novel Is a Dark, Cool Tonic for Blazing Summer Days.”
Xpress Reviews, July 13, 2018, Kate Gray, review of The Shades.
ONLINE
Macmillan website, https://us.macmillan.com/ (October 17, 2018), author profile.
Evgenia Citkowitz was born in New York and was educated in London and the United States. Her short stories have been published in various British magazines. She is the author of Ether.
DownloadPDF
Citkowitz, Evgenia.: The Shades
Kate Gray
Xpress Reviews. (July 13, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC
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Full Text:
[STAR] Citkowitz, Evgenia. The Shades. Norton. Jun. 2018. 208p. ISBN 9780393254129. $25.95; ebk. ISBN 9780393254136. F
[DEBUT] The intimate yet dysfunctional family at the center of Citkowitz's debut novel may be inspired by the author's own famous family: her mother, Lady Caroline Blackwood, was a celebrated author and notorious drinker, and her sister Ivana Lowell wrote a memoir about her difficult childhood. Here, Catherine and Michael are a well-off artistic couple living in London who lose their 15-year-old daughter Rachel in a car accident. Soon after, their son insists on going away to boarding school, where he develops an unhealthy obsession with climate change. Finding herself with a prematurely empty nest, Catherine spends a lot of time holed up in their historic country house. A striking young girl who used to live there comes to visit, and Catherine is infatuated. The girl is Catherine, but she is also Rachel, and Catherine's mother, who drowned mysteriously. The basics of the novel's plot can't come close to describing the hypnotizing puzzle that Citkowitz creates.
Verdict The characters and setting make this addictive to read, with twists that will have readers going back to savor details they missed. Recommended for fans of literary mysteries and family sagas.--Kate Gray, Boston P.L.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gray, Kate. "Citkowitz, Evgenia.: The Shades." Xpress Reviews, 13 July 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A546502480/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fd1c9e15. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A546502480
Ether: Seven Stories and a Novella
Heller McAlpin
The Christian Science Monitor. (Apr. 23, 2010): Arts and Entertainment:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 The Christian Science Publishing Society
http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
Full Text:
Byline: Heller McAlpin
Do you view life as "harsh and unforgiving," or as a renewable source of optimism? According to one of Evgenia Citkowitz's resilient, down-but-not-out characters in Ether, her striking debut collection of stories, the difference may be "more a question of attitude and the rebound effect of what you put out there into the ether."
If that sentiment sounds a little New-Age Californian, you're not totally off. Citkowitz, the daughter of American composer and pianist Israel Citkowitz and Anglo-Irish Guinness heiress and novelist Lady Caroline Blackwood (whose first and third husbands were painter Lucian Freud and poet Robert Lowell, respectively), was educated in London and the United States. She is a screenwriter married to British actor Julian Sands, and they live in Los Angeles, where many of her stories are set.
To say that Citkowitz comes from a background steeped in the arts is putting it mildly. Yet, with the notable exception of the title novella, which concerns a blocked writer who marries a Hollywood star and secretly mines their life for material, Citkowitz mainly steers clear of show business, writers, art, and, it appears, her high-profile autobiography.
Citkowitz's strength is social criticism, and she captures tensions and pretensions with killer details - such as the supposedly indifferent mistress who digs her nails into her departing lover's arm when she leans in for a perfunctory kiss in front of her husband. Her characters struggle to find their moral bearings and their identity, often without benefit of a known father. Many are privileged, but not in parental love.
Although some of her stories are a bit thin, her best, including "The Bachelor's Table," are richly nuanced. When a new father, Jonathan, who feels estranged from his wife, young son, and unhelpful, boozy mother-in-law, buys a multi-purpose 18th-century "bachelor's table" he spots in a Sag Harbor antique shop on Christmas Eve, his purchase raises all sorts of issues. The table is nearly identical to one that Jonathan's absentee father showed him during one of their two meetings - which continues to haunt Jonathan as a test he failed, since it led to no further relationship.
Without being heavy-handed about it, Citkowitz endows this object with layers of meaning. Not only does Jonathan associate the table with his deadbeat father, a wealthy French art critic, but he buys it for a steal, later learning from the chagrined saleswoman that she inadvertently dropped a digit from the price, charging $3,300 instead of $33,000. Should he keep it anyway, even though he knows it's not his wife's taste? Should he pay the difference? Or should he return it? What's at stake is his moral fibre and what sort of father and husband he'll be.
"Sunday's Child," set in southern California, is about a mordantly funny, self-described fat white woman, an actor in sitcoms and voice-overs, with moral fibre aplenty. Her heart aches for the troubled black boy she adopted from a website called sundayschild.com, especially when the parents at his Montessori school "scatter, or become very involved buckling the backpack" whenever she and Ambrose approach: "Anything to avoid talking to us."
But she's as critical of her own limitations as of others'. After dislodging the teenage girl she finds asleep in her backyard playhouse, she's wracked with guilt: "Ambrose was essentially homeless when I took him in. Why wasn't there room for one more?" she asks herself. She's chagrined to recognize that what she's afraid of isn't the girl, but of facing "the terrifying sorrow in myself."
More sober than ethereal, the title novella, "Ether," is ambitious beyond its 116-page scope. Not altogether smoothly, Citkowitz addresses issues of success, failure, commitment, and responsibility by linking two sets of characters at extremes of the socioeconomic scale.
Her blocked novelist, William, is one of her more disturbing characters, in part because it isn't clear how Citkowitz wants us to feel about him. We meet him during his ghoulishly unsentimental farewell tryst with his editor - who also happens to be his oldest friend's wife and who is as hard as the nails she later digs into his arm. Stalled on his novel for years, he heads to California for a teaching gig, where he falls in love with Madeline, a hot young movie star. Just as he knew that sleeping with his editor and friend's wife was "in no one's interest," he also knows that writing about his relationship with Madeline is a bad idea - yet he proceeds anyway.
After setting up William and Madeline, Citkowitz makes a jarring and initially baffling leap over the tracks into Barbara Ehrenreich territory, to a single mother who barely gets by waitressing at Denny's. This woman remains stalwart despite having every reason to despair, including an autistic son whose obsession with Madeline becomes the fulcrum between the two halves of Citkowitz's tale. The result is a disconcerting probe into various guises of failure.
Heller McAlpin, a freelance critic in New York, is a frequent Monitor contributor.
Heller McAlpin
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
McAlpin, Heller. "Ether: Seven Stories and a Novella." Christian Science Monitor, 23 Apr. 2010. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A224762148/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9db39ca2. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
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Print Marked Items
The Shades
Publishers Weekly.
265.20 (May 14, 2018): p34+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Shades
Evgenia Citkowitz. Norton, $25.95 (192p) ISBN 978-0-393-25412-9
Citkowitz's ethereal latest (following Ether) dissects the messy tangle of past and present in the aftermath of
a young woman's death. A fatal automobile accident involving 16-year-old Rachel and her secret boyfriend
fractures the Hall family. Rachel's mother, Catherine, remains in the family's second home in Kent,
disengaged from life and her work as a successful art gallery owner until the arrival of a mysterious young
woman who claims to have lived in the house as a child. Catherine's growing interest in the stranger after
months of depressed detachment heartens her husband, Michael, who has been spending his days and nights
in London and yearning for a return to easily connecting with his wife. Their reticent son, Rowan, flees to a
remote, liberal boarding school to reshape his life away from his sister's death. His sudden, passionate
fixation on the threat of global warming and his decision to drop out of school jolts the family from their
long patterns of uncommunicative coexistence. Citkowitz meanders through her scant plot with ample
atmospheric detours through the family's past. Her depiction of the delicate, complicated attachment of
siblings is particularly touching. The prose sparklesas she unpacks emotional wounds, but the threads of
story remain too hazy and incomplete to be fully satisfying. This compact family drama captures the thinly
masked desperation of grief with an eerie undercurrent. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Shades." Publishers Weekly, 14 May 2018, p. 34+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A539387398/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4a736639.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A539387398
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Citkowitz, Evgenia: THE SHADES
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Citkowitz, Evgenia THE SHADES Norton (Adult Fiction) $25.95 7, 3 ISBN: 978-0-393-25412-9
A couple begins to unravel after the sudden death of their 16-year-old daughter in Citkowitz's (Ether, 2010)
haunting portrait of unsparing grief.
In the year since Rachel was killed in a car accident alongside her secret boyfriend, her parents have
retreated into separate worlds. Catherine, a high-powered gallerist, a tastemaker, has taken up residence at
their aged country house in Kent, where once they'd planned to retire--a thought now inconceivable.
Michael remains at the family home in London; there has, he reflects, always been "a remoteness that
created a space between them that he never understood," though the gulf is wider now, the initial wave of
grief having worn off. Meanwhile, their teenage son, Rowan, sweet and stoic, has fled to boarding school,
having made the arrangements for his escape himself. And so Catherine is alone when a mysterious young
woman arrives at the house, claiming to have lived there as a child. She is reinvigorated by the girl, striking
up what she believes to be the beginnings of a friendship. But the relationship soon darkens; the girl,
Catherine learns, may not be who she seems. Though the novel is short, with nothing extra, it seems to
encompass lifetimes: Time and space expand and contract, the present blurring seamlessly--unsettlingly--
with the past. We learn about Catherine's parents, her father's art, her mother's suicide; her courtship with
Michael; the day of Rachel's death. But we also see the present: the marriage and the house; Rowan
becoming increasingly obsessed with climate change at school. The mystery of the girl and the novel's
murky ending are arguably the least interesting elements of the book, which is driven less by the naked plot
than by the exquisite strength of Citkowitz's writing--spare, arresting, and emotionally precise.
A thoroughly modern novel with a Gothic feel; a fully realized vision.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Citkowitz, Evgenia: THE SHADES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536571207/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=843bbb4a.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
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Ether
Publishers Weekly.
257.11 (Mar. 15, 2010): p36.
COPYRIGHT 2010 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Ether
Evgenia Citkowitz. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25 (256p) ISBN 978-0-374-29887-6
Screenwriter Citkowitz maps the territory where false starts and disappointment sometimes lead to
unexpected opportunities in her debut collection of capricious stories and a disturbing novella. The title
novella follows William, a frustrated writer who abandons New York for L.A. and fails in love with
gorgeous actress Madeline. Their quick marriage inspires him to begin work on an autobiographical novel,
but when Madeline develops a mysterious illness and befriends a strange young man (William calls him
"the Psycho"), his attraction to her sours and his writing takes a dark turn. In "The Bachelor's Table,"
Jonathan Edel, a new father, buys an unwieldy antique table on a nostalgic whim, and its presence through
an uncomfortable Christmas with his alcoholic mother-in-law forces him to confront old regrets and
feelings of inadequacy. An aging actress adopts a troubled boy in "Sunday's Child," and the challenges they
both encounter--at school, at home--come to an unexpected head when a young homeless woman is found
sleeping in the boy's backyard playhouse. For all the uncomfortable situations and prickly emotion, the
pieces are remarkably easy to digest. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Ether." Publishers Weekly, 15 Mar. 2010, p. 36. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A221601359/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9fd4abcb.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A221601359
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Ether
Leah Strauss
Booklist.
106.16 (Apr. 15, 2010): p26.
COPYRIGHT 2010 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Ether.
By Evgenia Citkowitz.
May 2010. 256p. Farrar, $25 (9780374298876).
This engaging debut collection looks at diverse characters on the edge, as they struggle with vulnerability
and the conflicts in their choices, large and small. With "The Bachelor's Table," Jonathan, a lawyer, finds a
rare item at an antique store. When he learns that the treasure was sold to him at a grossly mistaken price,
he finds himself at a personal crossroads. In "Sunday's Child," a middle-aged foster mother is tormented by
her reaction when she discovers a young homeless woman living in her garden shed. The nuanced title tale
and novella follows William, a best-selling debut author, as he moves from New York to Los Angeles to
complete his next book. There he meets and falls in love with an up-and-coming young actress, Madeline,
but as their relationship deepens, so does Williams writer's block. When Madeline begins to suffer from an
unusual physical condition and her stability begins to crumble, William makes a detrimental choice to
complete his manuscript. Citkowitz deftly balances the rawer emotions of life--resentment, desire,
humiliation--with a crafted, clever tone. --Leah Strauss
Strauss, Leah
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Strauss, Leah. "Ether." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2010, p. 26. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A224774908/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=af1eb611.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A224774908
Evgenia Citkowitz’s New Novel Is a Dark, Cool Tonic for Blazing Summer Days
JUNE 20, 2018 8:00 AM
by CHLOE SCHAMA
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Evgenia Citkowitz’s The Shades is technically a first novel, but banish all assumptions that the designation might evoke. This is not single-strand auto-fiction, a thin mask for the author’s experience. (Citkowitz also published a collection of short stories in 2010.) It is an ambitious, structurally complex, richly allusive book. (I sensed the ghosts of Henry James and Daphne du Maurier; Citkowitz cites Elizabeth Bowen.) Literary DNA doesn’t pass from one generation to the next, of course, but when you consider Citkowitz’s pedigree, the level of accomplishment is somewhat less surprising. Citkowitz’s mother was the comic novelist Caroline Blackwood, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat born into the Guinness dynasty and once married to Lucian Freud whose novels were compared to those of Muriel Spark and Irish Murdoch, though an added dose of of “rather brilliant bitchiness” set hers apart. Her stepfather (the Freud union eventually broke up) was the poet Robert Lowell. She recently spoke with me for Vogue about growing up in their midst, and the inspiring terror of being a parent.
This is a first novel, but it doesn’t read like one. No offense to first-time novelists, but this is a layered, structurally ambitious, emotionally complex work told from shifting perspectives. How did you prepare to embark upon a complex book like this?
Whether I’m approaching a short story or novel, the process is essentially the same: I start small with an instinct or premise and build from there. With The Shades the first idea was about a person returning to a place of her/his youth. Then I started asking questions: Who is being visited? Who is doing the visiting? and I began to populate the place, expanding the idea to include themes that interested me. Eventually, the stories of a mother, father, son, deceased child, and ostensible interloper in a family materialized. I say “eventually” as the process took many years. Unfortunately, layering doesn’t take place all at once. With the different points of view and the circling structure, I was trying to get the feeling of a kaleidoscope, so that with the introduction and return of each character, it’s as if the story is being shaken and re-set to a new place of understanding each time.
The book is quite short, but packs an enormous amount into its 190-ish pages. Did you always set out to write a dense book? Or had you imagined something more sprawling at one point?
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My characters are intense, and the events in the book are too. The knotted prose is most often a reflection of gnarly states of mind. When my wonderful editor, Jill Bialosky, first read the manuscript, she encouraged me to flesh out the story, which I did, but I believe she was less concerned about page count than wanting me to fulfill the characters. When I started writing The Shades, I wanted it to be lean, to maintain tension and momentum. I also knew it was going to be a long haul. By that I mean, I always knew the structure was going to be challenging.
You’re compared to Patricia Highsmith and Ian McEwan in the promotional materials for the book. From my own very subjective perspective, the book also reminded me of Henry James, Alan Hollinghurst, Julian Barnes, and Daphne du Maurier. Did you have any particular literary references in mind as you were writing?
The British have a tradition of using houses like characters and I wanted something of that kind of atmosphere and presence. Yes, I dreamed of Daphne du Maurier while I was writing—Elizabeth Bowen as well. Bowen’s houses breathe and expirate. There’s terrific depth of feeling in her novels and stories, at the same time, elegance and restraint. I admire very much all the writers you mention. James’s The Turn of the Screw is eternally haunting. Initially, I set the story in San Francisco, before quickly realizing that the geography wasn’t going to work. You could say I was looking for my Manderley. Hence, I moved the story to the U.K., where it was easier to find a decaying estate of a particular kind.
Feel free to tell me they had no bearing on your literary aspirations, but both your mother (Caroline Blackwood) and your stepfather (Robert Lowell) were famous writers. Did growing up around writers shape you? Or did you find yourself pushing back against their profession? What did you learn or absorb by growing up in their midst?
Growing up around writers normalized it as an activity. Writing is a singular pursuit. The fact that creativity was valued and that words were considered important impacted me, for sure. Yet, in the end, if I hadn’t been innately interested in writing or had the will to tell stories myself, I’m not sure what it all would have meant, other than my having the opportunity to absorb or reject an appreciation for literature. My mother was temperamentally dramatic, but she wasn’t dramatic about writing. She got on with it. I think that was as valuable a lesson as any. Get on with it. I learned to write by writing. From her and Robert Lowell I saw that that in spite of the turmoil in their lives, writing was a quiet process, like watching someone put beads on a string. It didn’t seem romantic in any way. For two people who weren’t remotely organized, their application was always practical.
Someone—I thought it was Lorrie Moore, but Google is not helping me figure it out—once said that the way to write truly affecting fiction is to write about what terrifies you the most. I was thinking about this as I read certain parts of your book that had to do with the characters losing their children in various ways. Can you talk a little about what you wanted to convey about the relationship between parents and their children?
Yes, who said that? It’s intriguing. I can relate to being motivated to write from fear. In The Shades I wanted to explore what it means to be a parent in an uncertain world, the anxiety of it, and the barriers that we construct to keep the reality of that at bay. My novel is what happens when a family is slammed and their protective cocoon destroyed. As parents we are invested in the idea of nurture, and believe that if we give our children the best, and provide every support, we will have succeeded. There’s beauty in that, the love, work, sacrifice, and care that takes, and it’s mostly for the good, but we are also invested in the idea because it presupposes that we have more control over our children’s lives than we do. It’s a kind of necessary hubris. Not to believe in the power of our influence would be terrifying, because if we don’t, it means we are helpless to protect our children. I also wanted to say something about resilience. Children grow up because of their parents, and also in spite of them. As well as being vulnerable, they are often wiser and more resilient than we sometimes know.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
In 'The Shades,' a family is haunted by their daughter's death
By SCOTT CHESHIRE
JUL 18, 2018 | 8:00 AM
In 'The Shades,' a family is haunted by their daughter's death
Evgenia Citkowitz, author of the novel 'The Shades.' (Natalya Sands)
Early in Evgenia Citkowitz’s thrillingly hushed and haunted novel, half-doting husband Michael recalls his third date with wife-to-be Catherine: “On a lucky hunch, he had bought tickets to a concert performance of Monteverdi’s ‘L’Orfeo’ …. The opera, written in Italian, retold the mythic story of Orpheus’s journey to the underworld to bring back his wife, Eurydice, after her death. When Orfeo tries to cross the Styx, the river that separates the land of the living from the dead, Caronte, ferrymen of shades, the souls of the dead, refuses to take him, as Orfeo is still alive.”
Famously, Orfeo, a master poet, singer and lyrist, convincingly serenades Caronte, followed by Pluto, lord of the underworld, begging that love beat death, that his wife go home with him across the river. Moved, Pluto concedes — but with a rule. Orpheus may not look back until they’ve landed. Orpheus inevitably, humanly fails, losing his wife forever. “L’Orfeo” was “astonishing,” according to Michael, and the opera reduced Catherine to tears. He “offered his hand, which she took, interlacing her fingers between his.” An auspicious performance, the show bodes well for the couple.
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Or does it?
The scene is part of a long reminiscence on behalf of Michael about their courtship and marriage, which ultimately leads to a painful, blunt and too recent memory: “Then Rachel was dead.” The prior year, their teenage daughter was killed in a car accident; her death has since fractured the family, leaving Catherine and Michael abiding in separate homes. She remains in their English country house while Michael stays largely in London and their son, Rowan, attends boarding school, physically and emotionally removed from his parents.
Catherine is nearly overwhelmed by grief, but not quite. She copes admirably as she obsesses over her daughter’s texts, emails, cellphone photos and the final call she missed the night of Rachel’s death.
'The Shades' by Evgenia Citkowitz
'The Shades' by Evgenia Citkowitz (W.W. Norton)
Alternately preoccupied by the details and possible details of her daughter’s last days and the widely circling members of her family, she endures. A successful gallerist, she also worries about work, the artists she represents and the artists and the work she has lost.
The novel is suffused with loss. To name a few: the possible suicide of a young woman; the death of John Bramley, an elder artist, with whom Catherine had an intensely physical, though not sexual, relationship; and the death of Catherine’s mother (suicide? accident?), whom she never did mourn because to “to stop and mourn the opaque woman,” she thinks, “would have been to comprehend and absorb something of her pain. The best she could do was launch back into her studies and finish her dissertation, and hope that whatever had happened, her mother hadn’t suffered at the end.”
This is Catherine’s strategy, after all, and she applies the same approach to the loss of Rachel, welcoming “reconstituted wartime advice on a coffee mug … keep calm and freak out later.”
Michael, on the other hand, “saw that Catherine wasn’t as strong as he would like to believe. Although optimism was important, she was still fragile; he wasn’t sure how she’d be able to cope on her own.”
Aside from the overly critical assumption, it should also be said this comes at the tail end of Michael’s vacillating back and forth between the shores of fidelity and adultery. Which is to say, to imagine cheating with one of Catherine’s oldest friends, Paige (who knows if Paige would reciprocate): “images of Paige’s ripe limbs and aubergine hair kept coming back to him and were probably all the more delicious for being forbidden, he had surrendered to lustful thoughts in the early hours, hoping that they didn’t constitute lechery or betrayal.”
Michael seems a weak man with a weakness for soft axioms: “positivity wasn’t a mood but a precept of character”; “we must be good to each other, here and now”; “All we can ever do is hope for the best.”
The two make a contradictory and fascinating couple, married but emotionally divorced, nearly opposite in their reactions to their daughter’s death, physically removed from each other, even as their motivations and fantasies remain entangled.
And yet, for all its quiet, gripping work, this book is not without suspenseful turns of plot. Enter Keira, a young woman (Rachel’s age?) who one day mysteriously shows up at the country house, claiming to have lived there as a child. Keira draws genuine sympathy from Catherine, despite the young woman showing increasingly distressing signs of being someone other than who she claims. Trouble follows, and it’s unstoppably real.
While reading, I was often reminded of a knotty poem by the poet Kay Ryan, “The Niagara River.” In it, she frames our fleeting lives on the Niagara River, how “we / do know, we do / know this is the / Niagara River, but / it is hard to remember / what that means.” Citkowitz suggests something similar, reminding us the dead are, indeed, no longer for the living, even while testing and re-imagining the original myth. There is the idea that the dead never do wholly cross, staying on in memory, shaping our projections, paranoias, desires and dreams. But most visionary is the subtle intimation that possibly all of us are shades, to some extent, that we travel with the dead, sharing one river, on the very same water, and not just after we fall. Brilliantly constructed, “The Shades” is ghostly and alive, cerebral and sensuous, an absolutely riveting read.
Cheshire is the author of the novel "High as the Horses' Bridles" and teaches at Queens College, City University of New York.
::
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“The Shades”
Evgenia Citkowitz
W.W. Norton: 208 pp., $25.95
The Shades
July 18, 2018
In 'The Shades,' a family is haunted by their daughter's death
By SCOTT CHESHIRE
JUL 18, 2018 | 8:00 AM
In 'The Shades,' a family is haunted by their daughter's death
Evgenia Citkowitz, author of the novel 'The Shades.' (Natalya Sands)
Early in Evgenia Citkowitz’s thrillingly hushed and haunted novel, half-doting husband Michael recalls his third date with wife-to-be Catherine: “On a lucky hunch, he had bought tickets to a concert performance of Monteverdi’s ‘L’Orfeo’ …. The opera, written in Italian, retold the mythic story of Orpheus’s journey to the underworld to bring back his wife, Eurydice, after her death. When Orfeo tries to cross the Styx, the river that separates the land of the living from the dead, Caronte, ferrymen of shades, the souls of the dead, refuses to take him, as Orfeo is still alive.”
Famously, Orfeo, a master poet, singer and lyrist, convincingly serenades Caronte, followed by Pluto, lord of the underworld, begging that love beat death, that his wife go home with him across the river. Moved, Pluto concedes — but with a rule. Orpheus may not look back until they’ve landed. Orpheus inevitably, humanly fails, losing his wife forever. “L’Orfeo” was “astonishing,” according to Michael, and the opera reduced Catherine to tears. He “offered his hand, which she took, interlacing her fingers between his.” An auspicious performance, the show bodes well for the couple.
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Or does it?
The scene is part of a long reminiscence on behalf of Michael about their courtship and marriage, which ultimately leads to a painful, blunt and too recent memory: “Then Rachel was dead.” The prior year, their teenage daughter was killed in a car accident; her death has since fractured the family, leaving Catherine and Michael abiding in separate homes. She remains in their English country house while Michael stays largely in London and their son, Rowan, attends boarding school, physically and emotionally removed from his parents.
Catherine is nearly overwhelmed by grief, but not quite. She copes admirably as she obsesses over her daughter’s texts, emails, cellphone photos and the final call she missed the night of Rachel’s death.
'The Shades' by Evgenia Citkowitz
'The Shades' by Evgenia Citkowitz (W.W. Norton)
Alternately preoccupied by the details and possible details of her daughter’s last days and the widely circling members of her family, she endures. A successful gallerist, she also worries about work, the artists she represents and the artists and the work she has lost.
The novel is suffused with loss. To name a few: the possible suicide of a young woman; the death of John Bramley, an elder artist, with whom Catherine had an intensely physical, though not sexual, relationship; and the death of Catherine’s mother (suicide? accident?), whom she never did mourn because to “to stop and mourn the opaque woman,” she thinks, “would have been to comprehend and absorb something of her pain. The best she could do was launch back into her studies and finish her dissertation, and hope that whatever had happened, her mother hadn’t suffered at the end.”
This is Catherine’s strategy, after all, and she applies the same approach to the loss of Rachel, welcoming “reconstituted wartime advice on a coffee mug … keep calm and freak out later.”
Michael, on the other hand, “saw that Catherine wasn’t as strong as he would like to believe. Although optimism was important, she was still fragile; he wasn’t sure how she’d be able to cope on her own.”
Aside from the overly critical assumption, it should also be said this comes at the tail end of Michael’s vacillating back and forth between the shores of fidelity and adultery. Which is to say, to imagine cheating with one of Catherine’s oldest friends, Paige (who knows if Paige would reciprocate): “images of Paige’s ripe limbs and aubergine hair kept coming back to him and were probably all the more delicious for being forbidden, he had surrendered to lustful thoughts in the early hours, hoping that they didn’t constitute lechery or betrayal.”
Michael seems a weak man with a weakness for soft axioms: “positivity wasn’t a mood but a precept of character”; “we must be good to each other, here and now”; “All we can ever do is hope for the best.”
The two make a contradictory and fascinating couple, married but emotionally divorced, nearly opposite in their reactions to their daughter’s death, physically removed from each other, even as their motivations and fantasies remain entangled.
And yet, for all its quiet, gripping work, this book is not without suspenseful turns of plot. Enter Keira, a young woman (Rachel’s age?) who one day mysteriously shows up at the country house, claiming to have lived there as a child. Keira draws genuine sympathy from Catherine, despite the young woman showing increasingly distressing signs of being someone other than who she claims. Trouble follows, and it’s unstoppably real.
While reading, I was often reminded of a knotty poem by the poet Kay Ryan, “The Niagara River.” In it, she frames our fleeting lives on the Niagara River, how “we / do know, we do / know this is the / Niagara River, but / it is hard to remember / what that means.” Citkowitz suggests something similar, reminding us the dead are, indeed, no longer for the living, even while testing and re-imagining the original myth. There is the idea that the dead never do wholly cross, staying on in memory, shaping our projections, paranoias, desires and dreams. But most visionary is the subtle intimation that possibly all of us are shades, to some extent, that we travel with the dead, sharing one river, on the very same water, and not just after we fall. Brilliantly constructed, “The Shades” is ghostly and alive, cerebral and sensuous, an absolutely riveting read.
Cheshire is the author of the novel "High as the Horses' Bridles" and teaches at Queens College, City University of New York.
::
ADVERTISEMENT
“The Shades”
Evgenia Citkowitz
W.W. Norton: 208 pp., $25.95