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Page in Wednesday September BOOK RE VIEWS Glass Treehouse a trendcapturing novel By The Glass Treehouse a first novel by a Canadian writer strives to capture just about every trend going these days in conscientious fiction Woman as homemaker mental retardation homosexuali Americans north of the border especially during the Vietnamese War cancer all this set in modem day rural Quebec If author queline Nugent had waited a few months she might have included a few Mohawks as well Those of us born before the baby boomers should probably beginour reviews with a disclaimer of in in further explorations of the 1960s and their Canadian equivalent the s which have become a bit of a bore However it is also fair to begin by noting that Jenny Dubois the heroine of The Glass Treehouse now happily ing in a ramshackle house in the Quebec countryside though with a distinct nostalgia for the American past is largely free of the usual guilt and is bringing up her yearold son with dedication and good sense Though as we view her from outside she is not an especially interesting character her insight into herself is fairly keen SIDE BY SIDE The Gliss pages 95 brings together two neighbor families and weaves their stones side by side Jenny who has come to Canada in with a draft dodger and who stays when he goes back to the States to recant and join the war to marry a Quebecer and the Lacostes Therese and Yves with their retarded daughter ManeHelene for whom her father has built the play platform of the title in which the final tragedy which a review should not reveal takes place The two stories are given to us in much the way Dickens gave us his in Bleak House with the first person narrative of the heroine Anecdotes of modern art a compilation of research By LISA BALFOUR BOWEIS Some books are meant to be read from cover to cover Others seem programmed for more occasional reading or to be used as an thologies by the TV generation whose literacy capacity has been moulded by the clip Anecdotes Of Modern Art a page volume by Donald Hall and Pat Comngton Oxford University Press 95 falls into the latter category It offers a somewhat random and arbitrary selection of short anecdotal snip pets about nearly socalled modern artists Among these are familiar giants such as Pablo Picasso Henri Matisse Joan Miro Henry Moore Alexander Calder Salvador Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock We learn for example that Pollock was a taciturn bellicose alcoholic who loved jazz and baseball but was sometimes so dazed and depressed that he took weeks to actively get down to pain ting We also learn that at Dali was so when he first rived in Pans that he even cross the street He was afraid of everything from travelling b boat to insects in general Whenever he went out he hung on to an elaborate cane and always earned a little piece of driftwood from the beaches of Cadaques to ward off evil spirits Similar lightweight tidbits revealing various artistic foibles quirks and accentncities occur throughout the book Only sionally and briefly do we come across poignant and disturbing tales of sickness suicide and death Mostly we are served a cocktail party mixture of gossipy revela dons including some pretty bizarre stories about how fnends or lovers were treated or how work was produced Along the way reference to nudity sexual preferences and body parts are not uncommon Of Mondnan for instance we read that although he gave others the impression that he was sexually pure he was in fact an ardent embracer of women and no stranger to prostitutes Andy Warhol apparently had a great passion for drawing peo ple with a little heart on them or tied with a little ribbon whereas Henry Moore considered the umbilical area as absolutely central to his work The cord attaches to your mother after all We are informed that on hot days Georgia Keeffe worked stark naked at her easle and that Marc Chagall thought nothing of having his nubile 15 old daughter pose for him in the nude As for Picasso it comes as no surprise to learn that he once undressed his wife Olga made love to her and then promptly served her with divorce papers Picasso in fact dominates the book Not only is the section on him one of the longest a most thorough but tales of his dynamic escapades keep cropping up in other chapters on artists like Bra que Matisse Douanier Rousseau Giacometti and even Sol LeWitt The volume actually begins with a section on Rousseau and includes an episode about a banquet for him by Picasso Dur the festivities the hapless fell asleep while wax droppings from a lantern overhead formed a small pyramid like a clown s cap on his head While such anecdotes sometimes wet one s appetite for more they usually prove downright frustrating The reason is that the authors provide little or no true context for their selections which are unimaginatively stitched together and usually lifted holus bolus from other people s writings The end result is a computation of research material mas queradmg as a book Ultimately the reader must absorb une qual chapters about a series of in ternationally reknowned figures whose to modern art are submerged beneath a ton of trivia about their personal lives SHOPPING SPREE VALUE SOLID ANTIQUE BRASS Outdoor Lighting A COMPARE AT 99 OS COMPARE AT 99 COMPARE AT 77 STREET Georgetown 8732996 LIVING LIGHTING alternating with the third person omniscient narrative Dickens however allowed his all seeing observer the sardonic viewpoint that offsets the naivete of his heroine Nugent is merely telling two different stones observing Jenny from within and who eventually dies of cancer from a safer distance In both narratives there is touch of mysticism or at least of the fey has visions of a winged and feathered deity who intervenes from time to time in her life and who asserts its importance of ap pearing on the dustjacket as a reminder of the kinship between these two women And Jenny s story is told in a senes of letters to the Nowhere Man to whom she unburdens the details of her life through her father madness after the accidental killing of a child her own love affairs and her lifelong obsession with the homosexual boy she met at a crucial moment in her childhood At the end of the novel she picks up her life and returns after a brief ecstasy with the boy to the dull but safe life with Jean Paul in Quebec The Glass Treehouse is finally a novel about a woman s develop ment and her acceptance of a rather narrowed social role sup ported and made possible by a rich inner life While she has her treehouse of the mind one of the difficulties of his novel and perhaps one of its strengths is that the focus of our attention is too often turned away from Jenny and her family to the Not the least interesting character in the novel is the retarded Mane- Helene and the most interesting and touching relationship is the one between her and her father Yves The part they play in the final tragedy and the subtle im plication of Jenny and Jean Paul In that tragedy is the best thing in the book To end on a carping note directed at the publisher rather than the author there are more misprints a general problem these days than there should be in a book from a major house poor punctuation and misspellings dm poster vigourously And the author for one at least in part con with delineating the life of an American Anglo in Quebec does not always subtly translate every French word that is dropped conversation except the translatable tabemac This is an interesting novel especially to those of that genera that crossed the northern border to be cultureshocked m rural New France Prof teaches English and cinema studies at the University of Toronto He is a former vice president of the Popular Culture Association Thomson News Service MYGENEYTION Fashions For The Young At Heart MAIN ST GEORGETOWN From Knot Chinch 873 ESTHETICS TANNING TONING We SotcUHxa In Full Body Can EtacUiKuh Minkuru Ear SunTtnnini EitroM IjjliBranTirit Hadrian 8736013 Indoor 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