Author Description

In These Lowly Objects, Cate McGowan has fashioned one of the great fictional characters of our time in Jules Lalande, Dadaist extraordinaire. From his Dickensian childhood alongside a second cousin (and later, wife), Isobel, McGowan tracks--in rich, rigorous prose--the Zelig-like Lalande's wanderings through fin de siècle Paris as he rubs elbows with Degas and Cézanne, fights in World War I, lands in New York with Breton, becomes a professional boxer, hangs out with Duchamp, and disappears in Cuba--or does he? Enter this remarkably imagined, enchanted world and discover the many delights of McGowan's marvelous creation. --Robin Lippincott, author of Blue Territory: A Meditation on the Life and Art of Joan Mitchell Lyrical, stunning, and deeply strange, Cate McGowan's novel concerns a shape-shifting protagonist, Jules Lalande. Lalande disappeared years ago: various people--his estranged wife Isobel Wright, journalist Titus Pidgeon, and the people Pidgeon interviews, including historical figures like Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp--chase his scent. McGowan's luminous novel tracks their efforts to conjure this enigmatic poet-painter-performance artist-thief-con man-duke-trauma victim-killer-healer. Twisty and original, These Lowly Objects is fundamentally about self-hood, its precariousness and perishability, and its surprising capacity for resurrection. --Kim Magowan, author of Undoing and The Light Source