One Woman Show

One Woman Show. I love efficient character sketches in fiction.This show-stoppingly creative novel is all short, perfect evocations of character.  A clever fictional biography of a society woman in New York City in most of the last century, but the method is to describe her at each phase of her life as a description card mounted next to an artwork in a museum. The reader has some leeway to decide what is being described. At first I imagined these were photos but a closer look at the cover decided me that they are porcelain figurines, described in words that could apply to vases – but it doesn't really matter.  In single paragraphs, each person (mostly the woman nicknamed Kitty, but also her husbands, lovers and close family and friends) are depicted in their good, bad, strong, frail, stereotypical and banal glory. Kitty, born into wealth and a Smith college drop-out after a rich man proposes to her, lives generally a life of privilege and social competition but also marked by heartbreak and rebellion.

It's a great read when a high creative concept is married with perfect execution, and that is how I see this delightful book. Coulson, who spent a long career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has the chops to do it and I am so glad I read it. Short read as each page has just one paragraph on it. Wish it was illustrated! 

Thanks #netgalley #christinecoulson, @simonandschuster for this advance e-copy. To be published in October. #onewomanshow #metropolitanmuseumofart

This book was a quick, delightful and utterly unique read. I devoured it all in one sitting and adored the new and creative format of the story, being told through museum wall labels. The novel follows Kitty, a woman born into wealthy American society in the early 20th century. We are taken on a journey through Kitty’s long and very eventful life, in which she lives through both wars, two dead husbands and one divorce but no children. She had an affair with Picasso and owned an original Braque. I loved the format of this novel, and I think it fit perfectly with the story and was able to tell it well. The labels were very believable, the language used was exactly the kind that you would find in a museum under a masterpiece! I adored the prose, and the easy way I was able to fully consume this novel through vignettes. My only criticisms would be that, in making the ‘labels’ so realistic, I found it very hard to understand a lot of the vocabulary and sentances as they used so much art-world and scholarly language.
I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading about strong, indépendant women and novels that span an entire lifetime.
Thank you NetGalley and Avid Reader Press for this ARC