The Shadow Catcher
By Marianne Wiggins
Atlantic, 323 pages, $25
There are a multitude of shadows in Marianne Wiggins’ new novel, “The Shadow Catcher,” as if its title were a proclamation of its literary aspiration as well. And to a large extent, it is.
Within its pages we encounter the manuscript of a novel called “The Shadow Catcher,” written by a novelist named Marianne Wiggins, who glimpses it in a meeting with her agent and some movie people interested in doing a ” ‘project’ ” on Edward S. Curtis, most famous for his nearly-35-year campaign to photograph American Indians. That undertaking was supported in spirit by Teddy Roosevelt (who wrote the foreword to the first volume of Curtis’ “The North American Indian,” a compendium of 40,000 images that assayed every tribe west of the Mississippi, shot from 1896 to 1930) and in cash most prominently by J.P. Morgan, who put up $75,000 to further Curtis’ work.
Shadow Catcher was a name (sometimes formulated as Soul Catcher) applied to Curtis by many of his subjects, whom he considered a vanishing race. Parts of Wiggins’ novel are her — or the character Marianne Wiggins’ — fictionalization of Curtis’ life, but this is intermixed with treatment of the lives of Wiggins the author and Wiggins the character, shadows of each other in ways difficult to determine within the confines of the novel. This plays to its strengths, however, for the difference between being and representational accounts of being — whether in photographs or documents or paintings or memory — is a central concern of this fiction.
Wiggins — one of her, anyway — teasingly has her fun with concepts of the West versus its reality, with the Twainian idea of lighting out for the territories, with cowboys and Indians, with vast, empty spaces and existential angst, and with big-rig drivers, too, particularly on a haul between the twin chimeras of Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
She has received a call from a Las Vegas hospital informing her that her father is in an intensive-care unit there, having suffered cardiac arrest. Wiggins must reconcile this with her knowledge that her father has been dead more than 30 years, although she and her sister never saw his body, and she dreamed once that he “showed up and told me he had been living in another city all this time.”
Within this novel we also find two nearly identical bracelets named The Shadow Catcher, made by the father of an Indian referred to as Mr. Shadow. Amusingly, amazingly, Mr. Shadow’s father was a scout and friend of Curtis’, and his name was Owns His Shadow. We also are introduced to a character named Curtis Edwards, whose life connects to the story of the fictional Wiggins and her father, and to Edward Curtis (an “energetic shadow”) as well. The fictional Wiggins wants to explain that, as a novelist, she is “used to chasing shadows for a living.”
This is probably the point to say, Don’t worry. Readers should be used to such doubling from the likes of Philip Roth and others by now. But Wiggins is somewhat off on her own here too. She has integrated photographic elements in her text, several from Curtis and a few from her family, and in her acknowledgments gives credit to W.G. Sebald (the late German author of “The Emigrants,” “The Rings of Saturn” and other works) for hinting at “a new way of reading” through use of photographs with text. Sebald’s use of graphics was hauntingly vague, however, with the relation between text and picture cast quite tentatively; Wiggins links the text and graphics far more directly.
Yet enormous ambiguity creeps in, especially with Curtis’ work, because his methods and aims led him to pose his shots and excise modern elements, to make them appear more historical than they were and imbue them with a mythic quality of having captured lives already gone.
Early in “The Shadow Catcher,” in the meeting with the movie people, Wiggins construes one of their comments to mean her novel was “still a little messy,” resembling life more than art:
“And if you were Cartier-Bresson you’d move yourself into position, you’d align yourself along the arc of possibility and wait for a decisive moment when life, itself, composes into art. Or, if you’re Edward Curtis, you dress the mess to play the part. You disguise the truth to make the image that you want.”
This is what novelists do, of course, in carefully constructing their settings and verbal imagery to create an illusion of lives that never were. The approach can vary greatly, from a tightly controlled environment in which not a hair is out of place (Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead” is a good recent example), to more freewheeling, rough-and-tumble narrations, which is the case in “The Shadow Catcher.” It is a quick-flowing and rich slurry of ideas, situations and wordplay, in which concepts sometimes appear in capital letters, the author trying to think big while the seemingly casual commentary of the narrative voice, apt to flit here and there without much preface, imitates the naturalistic disjunction that daily experience and one’s thought process can have.
The evocations of Curtis and his wife, Clara, are strong and in broad historical outline follow the contours of their lives: the photographic studios he established in Seattle, his extended trips away from home, the end of their marriage, Clara’s drowning in Puget Sound, Edward’s estrangement from his brother Asahel and their decades of silence — all are matters of public record. But readers should keep in mind that fiction is as fiction does, and what fiction does is fabricate.
For example, there is a wonderful scene in which Clara decides to take a bath, outdoors, surrounding a tub with hung sheets for privacy. She looks up to see Edward, repairing a roof, gazing down at her. Rather than cover up, she stands so that he might see her. Edward falls from the roof, injuring his back, and Clara nurses him back to health. In life, Clara indeed nursed Edward back to health, after he had injured his back in 1890 working in a lumberyard.
So, like a Curtis photograph, we have lives bent to aesthetic ends. ” ‘[L]earn to take the sort of photographs that speak the truth about their subjects,’ ” Wiggins has Clara tell Edward at one point, and we sense the author’s embrace of that goal. Much of “The Shadow Catcher” deals with the loneliness that families can breed, in which missing or dead parents play a prominent role. Curtis Edwards was a missing father, as was Edward Curtis, as was Marianne’s father John Wiggins, as were Clara’s parents, who were killed at an early age. Edward Curtis, on the road so much, was called Chief by his children and “became, by disappearing from their daily lives, not a father but the MYTH of one, a myth they needed to believe in to survive,” Wiggins proposes.
In the clever interleafing of theme and circumstance that marks this novel, while Wiggins the novelist is in Las Vegas, in a ladies’ rest room, a girl displays a “flat daddy,” a partial cardboard reproduction of her father, a reminder and stand-in while he is in Iraq. Riding in a car with the Navajo who has been called Mr. Shadow but whose name is really Lester, Wiggins remarks of Curtis’ work:
” ‘They’re beautiful, his photographs. But to me they’re still flat daddies.’ “
“We dream the dead in ways that serve our needs,” Wiggins writes. Perhaps that is so; the necessity of connection between the past and present has engaged her before, notably in the novel “Almost Heaven,” in which a case of amnesia requires efforts to reconstruct a personal history. In “The Shadow Catcher” she reports a game she plays in wide-open spaces, called Catch the Vanishing, attempting to view the convergence point of objects at their moment of disappearance on the horizon. It’s what Curtis thought he was doing too. He got Red Cloud, Geronimo and the Crow scouts who guided Custer to the Little Bighorn but escaped the massacre. We get a meditation on what he might have missed, and what we all might miss.
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Art Winslow, a former literary and executive editor of The Nation, writes frequently about books and culture.
