These Lowly Objects

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