Interviewing Matisse, or The Woman Who Died Standing Up

by Lily Tuck

Lily, Molly, and Inez are women of a certain age, of a certain bearing, of a certain class. Late one dire night, Molly telephones from Connecticut to catch Lily up with the news: Inez's corpse -- near-naked but wearing boots -- has been discovered propped up "like a broom" in a corner of her Soho loft. It is an occasion ripe for an all-night heart-to-heart conversation, bouncing deliriously from one evasion to the next -- until the pair of talk-crazy, talk-weary women have successfully diverted themselves with all the wonderfully vagrant stuff of life . . . with everything, in fact, except grief.

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Lily Tuck is an American novelist and short story writer whose novel The News from Paraguay won the 2004 National Book Award for Fiction. Her novel Siam was nominated for the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She has published four other novels, a collection of short stories, and a biography of Italian novelist Elsa Morante (see "Works" below).
An American citizen born in Paris, Tuck now divides her time between New York City and Maine; she has also lived in Thailand and (during her childhood) Uruguay and Peru. Tuck has stated that "living in other countries has given me a different perspective as a writer. It has heightened my sense of dislocation and rootlessness. ... I think this feeling is reflected in my characters, most of them women whose lives are changed by either a physical displacement or a loss of some kind".

Reviews

[M. Sarki · Rating 2 out of 5]

I made it a third of the way through before throwing in the towel. Remarkable, it being my third try at reading this book. It will be my last attempt to connect with Lily Tuck at least on this level. She cannot reach me, nor can I reach her, with this offering of hers made under the tutelage and championing of Gordon Lish. Lily has gone on to write other acclaimed books, and recently I read her latest one titled Sisters which was really quite good and far more accessible than Matisse was. This rattling drivel was tiresome, and somewhat pretentious. Felt I was going nowhere fast and wasting my time. But other literary Tuck events await me. I have two additional novels sitting on my shelf. And my bet is they will be far better than this one, at one time, had promised to be.

[Reisse Myy Fredericks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita… Despite the mixed reviews, I really liked this. It’s a phone call between friends who’d rather talk about anything than the thing at hand: a friend’s psychosexual death. Very simply, it’s about how far people will go to derealize catastrophe, fortifying gossip and small talk as a shield against discomfort.

[Debby Hammer · Rating 5 out of 5]

One detail makes all the difference.

[Tuck · Rating 3 out of 5]

wonderful first novel about what we talk about when we talk about death. in this, everything and anything we can think of.

[Trista Mayes · Rating 1 out of 5]

Perhaps I just don't talk the way the women in the book talk- which is saying someone's name REPEATEDLY throughout EVERY SENTENCE of my conversation with them. What sounded like an interesting premise quickly fell into a disappointing, scatterbrained, frustratingly "meh" of a book. Disturbing stories of poor animals were littered throughout, pieces of stories that I could barely keep track of were strewn about carelessly, and overall it was simply a book that wasn't worth the time I spent reading it.

I'll post below the only two quotes I found worthy of noting. (Most books have so many good ones I can't write them all...)

Quote 1: "The time I lived with the count in the razor blade factory was the happiest time in my life."

Quote 2: "Price told Claude-Marie he wanted to remember Inez another way- alive, I guess."

[Jen · Rating 1 out of 5]

This had an interesting premise: one long conversation between two women discussing a strange death of a friend.

Some novels are filled with descriptions of people and places, and good novels make every word necessary to the unfolding of plot, conflict, and character development.

This book was the opposite - riddled with nothing BUT dialogue, and BAD dialogue at that. People don’t talk like this (and they don’t address each other at the beginning of almost every phrase).

And in the end, I guess, a book should be interesting.

[iscalynch · Rating 2 out of 5]

even the real housewives of new york city want nothing to do with these uppity hags who can YAP and hate each other so bad

i fear the satire is getting to me… is this what i sound like when i say, “the other day”, but i really mean something that happened four years ago and then i have to explain all the lore???

kinda loving the way molly is shamelessly ignoring lily’s unsubtle hints about it being THREE THIRTY IN THE MORNING and just keeps on YAPPING… only for lily to have the most heinous, most despicable villain reveal PAGES from the end… my word

[s]he’s sart of like an evil porson

[squishyam · Rating 3 out of 5]

i kept expecting this to have some sort of arc and had to retroactively recalibrate my expectations when it didn't