The Correspondence Artist

by Barbara Browning

For three years, an unremarkable woman has been carrying on with an internationally recognized artist, largely via email. Fame contaminates things. There are those who stand to profit from information about this affair, and others who stand to lose. So she creates a series of correspondent, alternative lovers in a kind of self-destructing roman à clef.

Genres: Fiction, Queer, LGBT, Literature, Art, Romance, American

178 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Barbara Browning's debut novel, The Correspondence Artist, was published in February, 2011. She has a PhD from Yale in Comparative Literature. She teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. She's also a poet and a dancer. She lives with her son in Greenwich Village.

Reviews

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written from the first-person viewpoint of a woman who cannot disclose the identity of her famous and faraway “paramour,” the narrator instead creates in great detail four famous (fictional) people to take the paramour’s place. In emails she's crafted to each of the four, as well as in explanations for the reader, she reveals incidents she experienced with the unidentified paramour. Because each incident is told as if it happened four different times, the novel can feel a bit repetitive, as the narrator points out. She’s not inclined to change her method, though, as she’s fallen in love with certain aspects of each of her fictional four. Probably more in love with the four than with the distant paramour, she looks forward to (writing) them each morning. Her relationships with the four seem to be much more rewarding than her “real-life” correspondence with the paramour, which the reader never sees.

I enjoyed the Simone de Beauvoir-Nelson Algren interludes. Though a note in the beginning of the book states that all quotations attributed to real public figures are fictional, some of the narrator’s musings seem to be based on actual writings. But then, what is fact anyway when it comes to relationships?

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like Roth's The Counterlife or Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, Barbara Browning's The Correspondence Artist is a marvelous tesseract, an unidentifiable flying object giddily exploring fictional lives and "real" personae, the extraordinary and the everyday, heartache and jeu d'esprit. This was my first time reading Browning's work but it won't be my last.

[A · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars. A fascinating academic exercise, but not really a good novel. Browning has lots of interesting things to say and connections to tease out, but she's really not capable enough of a crafter of fiction to justify using the novel(la) format to present her ideas. Better to have done this up as a sort of Wayne Koestenbaumesque memoir-treatise piece than try and stumble through this unsuccessful, sort of half-baked novel concept.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love the conceit and its execution, though it went on a bit too long, I think. In this work of autofiction, Browning's narrator chronicles a recent romantic "intrigue" that takes place largely over correspondence. The trick is that her paramour is veiled as and reconstructed as four different characters who represent a range of gender, national, age, and artistic/political identities/backgrounds. The same basic events of the love plot occur again and again, each one taking a different form with each paramour. Romantic fantasy for intellectuals, clever and enthusiastically intimate. I love Barbara Browning!

[Tobias · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reviewed this at Vol.1:

http://vol1brooklyn.com/2011/03/02/re...

[Lorri Steinbacher · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the concept of embodying one real life lover in the characters of four fictional ones. All of the characters were very different and yet they all captured something essential (one assumes) in the "paramour". It's funny because I struggled with the "intellectual" nature of some of the "narrative", not being knowledgable about Lacanian psychoanalysis, for instance, and wondered if as a consequence was missing something essential. As I thought about it, though, I realized that the novel works even so, perhaps because it sets a tone? I don't know a thing about Lacan, but I think I can imagine the personality of a character who might. The author captures how I feel about my feelings about the work (from her website for the book):

"... it will appeal to over-educated readers who aspire to a pop sensibility, and less erudite readers who aspire in the other direction. Because it’s the story of an ordinary 45-year-old woman who gets to sleep with four, count them four, international sex symbols, it will appeal to a lot of 45-year-old women.

Amen, sister.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Our narrator is having an affair with someone famous, and in order to protect the paramour's identity, she creates 4 other identities through which to tell her story. Imagine 4 flashlights, each a different color, shining inward to the central circle of our story. They combine to create a whitish light - "clever lies which secretly say the truth" - but there are still shades of hue and shadow. Browning offers commentaries on Fame, Culture, and Identity, and how those influence Love. Her deft passion and playfulness coupled with intellectual, psychological, and cultural analysis reminds me of Jeanette Winterson.

[Sabra Embury · Rating 3 out of 5]

The same fantasy of a woman and her correspondence with a paramour, fictionalized repeatedly in a work of fiction, spells a hell of a lot of cerebral make-believe happening in the Correspondence Artist.

On a 1-10 scale of self-serving catharsis disguised as a novel, Browning's first work seems to hover in the higher numbers. The brilliance, is in her meaty incorporations of somewhat obscure intellectual figures as substitutes substituting other substitutes in a layer cake of looping infatuation. Otherwise, it's best to care the first time the scenarios and emails are revealed, if an impetus is to exist past the novel's halfway point.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received this book from a contest on GoodReads. When I first received the book it seemed interesting, but the further I read it, the more it seemed to be all over the place. I understood what she was trying to do, but after a while it became a bit tiring to figure out what all of the references were to. I would put it off until I had more time to sit down and look up all of the references, but I'd suggest it to anyone who was interested in art and media. All in all, not my style of literature, but could be fascinating to those who are interested in the above.

[Kirby Rock · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Correspondence Artist is way cool! This is the story of a freelance writer who has an affair with a celebrity who can't be named; in the interest of protecting her paramour's identity, she invents four fictitious lovers and tells the tale of their relationship through emails. Sound gimmicky? It's not. Simultaneously super intellectual AND a fun, entertaining read, unlike anything I've ever read.

[Jonathan Lee B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Correspondence Artist is reading someone else's sexts.

[Gary Butler · Rating 1 out of 5]

25th book read in 2013.

Number 304 out of 316 on my all time book list.

Follow the link below to see my video review:

http://youtu.be/78o4cbVU4PY

[Dearwassily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and circuitous, though it got sort of monotonous near the end.

[Stephen Pence · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book. Barbara Browning is a very good writer, but the characters she’s created as lovers are so two-dimensional. I enjoyed her love for her son and a lot of the way she writes between the emails.

[Hawkins Clay · Rating 3 out of 5]

sexy and pretentious in the good way, an interesting conceit that began to fall flat for me as the book wore on. weirdly incestual undertones too

[Amelia · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.9

[Léa Doucet · Rating 4 out of 5]

reading Les mandarins next

[Isabelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't think she quite pulls this off, but I am intrigued by the conceit and by her

[Liza]

I didn't think I would like this, but I did! Skimmed to the Tzipi parts, lez be honest.

[Oriana]

For someone who screams and screams about always thinking for yourself, I can be surprisingly sheeplike when it comes to certain influences. I mean, where's the line between fervent, frenzied devotion and brainless following? Who cares. The point is, if a recommendation comes from, say, Flavorpill, or McSweeney's, or Vice, or Gawker, chances are I'm all ears. And an extension of Gawker is Emily Books, led of course by Emily Gould (whom I have elsewhere professed my undying love for).

ANYWAY. The January rec from Emily Books is this little beauty, and here's what they say about it:

The Correspondence Artist is an instructive and dizzyingly smart book about love, sex, fame, and email. Vivian, a writer and single mother living in New York, finds herself involved with an internationally mega-famous artist. As the affair progresses, she begins to narrate the story of their not-quite-love by quoting her correspondence. But who is the recipient of Vivian's affection and her emails? It depends on which version of her story you prefer. She describes her lover, variously, as a Nobel Prize-winning Israeli novelist named Tzipi, a Vietnamese enfant terrible video artist named Binh, a Basque separatist activist named Santuxto, and a Malian rock star named Djeli. This kaleidoscopic approach allows Vivian to maintain an ironic remove from her seduction, her disappointments and triumphs, and even her heartbreak. But the overlapping layers of fiction also work to create a multi-dimensional portrait of a relationship that's even more vivid due to being partially obscured.

Yes, please!

[Althea J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

First, I came across this book when looking at the indie publishing house Two Dollar Radio, in pursuit of a book for the BookRiot Read Harder challenge. I saw the cover and without reading anything about it, I bought it, based on the gorgeous cover art alone.

Then, within the first several pages, she references a Thelonious Monk album I've never heard of before (Monk: The Transformer, which sounds amazing and I immediately ordered it --- someone somehow found recordings that capture his process in first learning "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You" and then transforming it into his distinctly Monk sound and ultimately recordings of him performing it. Can't wait to hear it!). Showing appreciation for Thelonious is practically a "Shibboleth" of being an awesome human in my book, so I knew I was in good hands.

By page 16, I was in love with Barbara Browning. As her protagonist Vivian writes in a correspondence with her fictitious(?) paramour, "I think being in love is when you allow yourself to enter into a state of fiction... Anyway, being in love... I do it with more facility than you."

With books, as in life, I fall in love easily, quickly, and with an open heart, only to be disappointed somewhere along the way. My love for The Correspondence Artist was tried at many points in the story, made more complicated, but ultimately endured through the end. This book takes the notion of truth in fiction to a fresh and interesting place.

I'll definitely be checking out more of Barbara Browning and Two Dollar Radio.

[Iggy D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really, really enjoyed this book.
It challenged me and my budding art education to keep up with it's smart, continuous, but never pretentious references to media that I'd never even heard of, but of course, know I should know about. It was sweet and sexual and intellectual, a perfect fit for me and my brain at the moment; short and poignant.
It helped inspire me in music, film, literature, politics, and visual art; all areas the main character's mysterious paramour are at some point heavily involved in. The premise is a bit difficult to explain, but it centers (fascinatingly and openly) on the narrator disguising the truth from the viewer, but telling a true story with the deceptions. (See a rather more romantic version of Bad Monkeys; also reviewed on my profile.)

[Ravin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the idea of envisioning a single lover into several different ones. It was an interesting read, especially how Browning described the same event happening several times, but making it a tad different. It did get a bit boring for me though to hear about the same event despite the differences. While reading, I came across a ton of words that I just didn't know. And me, being lazy, failed to look them up. Perhaps if I had taken the time to look them up, I would've enjoyed this novel more. I really did like this book, but I feel that I didn't get quite all I could from it because it used many words I'm unaccustomed to. I will probably reread in a few years (hopefully gaining some knowledge as to what the words mean) and then it will get the four stars it deserves.

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Emily Books delivers once again. This is only my second month of the program and I find the selection just as strange and compelling and unique as the previous title I read from Emily Books: Nine Months.

I cannot recommend both of these titles enough if you are feeling like there is something of a rut in your novel-reading and your novel-reading wagon wheel is stuck in that rut.

Full disclosure being that I kinda sorta completely forgot I read this book. To be fair, I am a terrible remember of books (it's why I'm on goodreads in the first place) but was it the short length? That it went a little over my head and needed a little more consideration than I could give it late at night? Possibly, probably.

[Dar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This experimental first novel combined mock autobiography, social media and erotica. A forty-something woman has a famous artist as a lover. She gives us 4 "scenarios" of who it might be, and tells us how their relationship unfolded - 4 different ways. Their story happens through a combination of email, video calls, and in-person visits, which are highly sexually charged. The narrator travels in sophisticated circles, but I found her emails quite naive...I liked that, because the impression you want to make on a distant lover, and the way you actually communicate day-to-day, can be entirely at odds with each other! Recommended.

[Veronica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received this book through First Reads.

I really enjoyed this short novel. I liked the use of the four characters to represent the narrator's "paramour", and the four parallel but unique storylines that resulted from this. Because the story is told largely through the narrator's email messages to the four, reading this book gives you the sense that you are reading love letters that were never meant for others to see. I'm looking forward to reading it a second time, as I am sure that there will be more connections between the four characters that will be revealed upon rereading.

[Trudy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was an experience. Does that make any sense? Totally engrossing and overwhelming. In taking (what I assume was) a real relationship, and turning it into all these other possible ones, and then fully admitting her attachment was stronger to the created ones at this point, while the (real?) relationship was in fact still occurring, the book has something powerful to say about the truth of love as we experience it. Wonderful for so many more reasons as well, but it's 5 am and I hate phone typing.

[Stefanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a deep intellectual romance with dissociative identity disorder. You could say her fictional lovers are all aspects of her true secret lover the paramour but then again they may also be reflections of the writer, Vivian. Either way, its a romance that has the ability to tell you everything and yet nothing all at the same time. The thought provoking conversations between everyone only add to its delightfulness along the way.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've written a review for the Collagist that I'm hoping will appear there eventually. The summary version is that there's a ton here to like, from the writing to the form to the anecdotes. But I'm not sure it ever fully comes together. You could say the same about most things, of course.

[Gabriel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this book by Barbara Browning. I found it to be a very original theme with characters who took "different forms" but in the end were one. I look forward to reading more from Ms Browning!