The Woman in Green: A Novel

by Larry Lockridge, Marcia Scanlon (Illustrator)

Overview

The narrator of THE WOMAN IN GREEN repeatedly insults his readers of 2050 and wishes he were instead addressing readers of 2025, when somewhat fewer were boneheads. Born under a curse at the exact moment of the 9/11 attacks, he looks back on two remarkable utopian experiments-one religious, the other secular-in early 19th-century New Harmony, Indiana. He then looks ahead to his grandfather Sam Coverdale's visionary effort in the millennial year 2000 to create a new "Boatload of Knowledge" on the banks of the Wabash. His cast of characters bears an unsettling resemblance to Mary Shelley's circle of Frankenstein intimates.

What could go wrong? From a macabre scroll found under a labyrinth to a dramatic fiasco on the world stage to a heady balloon ride to freedom, these characters plus one prescient turtle hang on together as friends and lovers, narrowly averting suicide within the ranks. Along the way, a Byronic character merrily cites strong evidence, hitherto overlooked, that Shakespeare himself was a suicide. Against the odds, they emerge with lasting romantic bonds and a vision that the enigmatic Woman in Green will someday prosper on Planet Earth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771806152
Publisher:	Iguana Books
Publication date:	12/05/2022
Series:	The Enigma Quartet , #4
Pages:	226
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.52(d)

About the Author

LARRY LOCKRIDGE is a writer living in New York City. Professor Emeritus of English, New York University, and a Guggenheim Fellow, he is best known for the award-winning biography of his father, "Shade of the Raintree: The Life and Death of Ross Lockridge, Jr.," author of "Raintree County." "The Woman in Green" is the last of four standalone yet interrelated, novels, "The Enigma Quartet," to be published by Iguana Books. It was launched January 5, 2023, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the 1948 publication of "Raintree County," to which it is indirectly an homage.

MARCIA SCANLON, painter, sculptor, and poet, has studios in Soho and upstate New York. She has been represented by John Stoller, Gettler-Paul, Maxwell Davidson, Central Booking, and Garvey|Simon. Her artwork is in personal, corporate, library, and museum collections here and abroad. Recent imagery in drawing, watercolor, and sculpture draws on the works of Sappho, Baudelaire, Mendeleev, and Joyce.

Editorial Reviews

2023-06-22
A group of seekers attempts to resurrect an old utopian community in Lockridge’s comic novel, the fourth in a series.

In the year 2050, an unnamed researcher presents his findings regarding the various utopian communities of New Harmony, Indiana. The researcher is an “adjunct assistant clinical instructor of post-millennial studies, Wabash College,” who happens to have been born at the exact moment the first plane hit the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. He is also the grandson of Sam Coverdale, founder of the most recent of these failed communities, a 1999 venture meant to achieve a convergence of all knowledge called the New Harmony Institute. Though many specialists were involved, the seven key players—according to our narrator—include two couples—the scientific Schillers and the artistic Gordons—plus the Gordons’ daughter, Allegra, Coverdale himself, and Coverdale’s “psychologically damaged” son, Hartley. In their attempts to avoid the mistakes of the previous utopian communities on the site—which were organized by a German zealot and a Welsh industrialist—the hapless Coverdalians uncover an encoded scroll at the bottom of a labyrinth, host a mammoth pageant, and discover a plague that might very well wipe out all of the world’s trees. Mostly, though, these aging intellectuals’ combustive interactions force them to consider the timeless inscrutability of marriage, parenthood, suicide, and life on Earth. The author’s madcap prose is as breathless as it is colorful. One chapter begins: “While others met to lick wounds at Le Pool Hall, Allegra sped in the Pathfinder to the shrine of the Dalai Lama’s brother, a few miles south of Bloomington. She was bewildered to find the shrine surrounded by thirty-three men in red fezzes peddling mini-cycles in intricate circular patterns.” The novel contains several layers of storytelling, and its mysteries take a leisurely approach to revealing themselves. There’s more play than plot, perhaps, but nearly every page is ripe with humor, literary references, and sincere questions about how we should be living.

A playful, postmodern exploration of the allure and limitations of utopia.

Kirkus Reviews