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| Chez Charlotte and Emily
ISBN: 9781573668231
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / The University of Alabama Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Married people;
Imagine a bookish man named Francis D., swimming at a public beach in Cape Cod, who drifts out beyond his depth. Imagine that he doesn't drown, that the tide carries him to a private cove where he is rescued by two mysterious young women named Charlotte and Emily. Imagine then that Francis leaves behind his former humdrum life-his formidable wife and teenage daughter-and embarks on a series of violent and erotic adventures, as dream-like as reels of film. Imagine at the same time that a man named Joshua Quartz is telling his silent wife, Genevieve, the story of Francis's adventures, that they have little other communication, that the story is a way of keeping contact between husband and wife alive. Imagine that at some point Genevieve tells her own story, within and without Joshua's account. Baumbach's characters make occasional connections, make love and war, in the disguises of metaphor. If the main action is dream-like or fantastic, the real world is always at the window looking in.
Jonathan David Baumbach was born in Brooklyn, New York on July 5, 1933. He received a bachelor's degree in English at Brooklyn College in 1955 and a master's degree in playwriting at Columbia University in 1956. After serving in the Army, he received a Ph.D. in English and American literature at Stanford University. He taught at several universities before joining the faculty of Brooklyn College in 1972, where he helped establish a master's program in creative writing. His first novel, A Man to Conjure With, was published in 1965. His other novels included What Comes Next, Reruns, Babble, Chez Charlotte and Emily, Separate Hours, Seven Wives: A Romance, and Dreams of Molly. He wrote four short story collections including The Life and Times of Major Fiction. He and Peter Spielberg created the Fiction Collective, a publishing house run by authors. Baumbach also wrote about film for Partisan Review and reviewed books for The Times and other publications. He died on March 28, 2019 at the age of 85. (Bowker Author Biography) |
