The bar at twilight

Novelist and critic Tuten follows up the memoir My Young Life with a heartfelt collection exploring existential quandaries and creative pursuits. "Winter, 1965" depicts a writer whose excitement over an acceptance from a literary journal turns sour after the story isn't published. The title story depicts a New Yorker down on his spirits who enters a bar only to be swept up in conversation with the bartender about romantic notions of the city, the dangers of love, and death. "In the Borghese Gardens" investigates the last years of Nathaniel Hawthorne's life from the perspective of a husband who imagines the latter days of writers and artists while anticipating the inevitable end of his marriage. In "The Lives of the Artists," Tuten probes the frustration and failure of an exhausted artist, depicting a painter so struck with a creative block that she turns to written accounts of other artists' challenges for help. No matter whether Tuten is chronicling the creative or romantic lives of his characters, he renders their struggles with a sense of hope and yearning, committing to sentiment without getting too overwrought. Tuten has long been viewed as a writer's writer, and this one offers special resonance for his audience. (May)

A heady and elegant collection of 15 stories, mostly about art and artists. The new collection from novelist and artist Tuten includes a few ventures into deadpan surrealism, but the dominant mode is realism, and the book's spine is provided by a deep interest in and polymathic knowledge of both visual and literary art. Many narrators here are critics, and several stories depict scholars trying to wring joy and consolation (or at least distraction) from expertise, doing their best to read their own lives--especially the complexities and puzzlements, the pleasures and longueurs of married love in middle life--through the details of, say, Montaigne's urinary agonies ("The Tower") or Hawthorne's final days in Italy ("In the Borghese Gardens"). The marvelous "Lives of the Artists" is told by an uxorious critic who's working on a book while eavesdropping on a meeting between the artist he's closest to, his wife (one of the book's several formidable, and formidably witty, women), and a gallery owner who may mount a show of her work. The book can occasionally feel like a miscellany; there is for instance a coda subtitled "Some Episodes in the History of My Reading" that appears to be just that, a nonfiction ramble through the writer's life as a reader, and a few pieces are charming bagatelles dedicated to, and perhaps written for, artist friends. But if the collection lacks the bravura of Tuten's remarkable Tintin in the New World (1993), it's recognizably the work of a gifted, resourceful writer: an old master. Smart, meditative stories about the art in life and the life in art. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.