LaFarge, Paul 1970-

views updated

LaFARGE, Paul 1970-

PERSONAL: Born 1970, in New York, NY. Education: Received degree from Yale University (summa cum laude), 1992; attended Stanford University Ph.D. program(comparative literature).

ADDRESSES: Home—San Francisco, CA. Agent—c/o Watkins Loomis Agency, 133 East 35th St., Ste. 1, New York, NY 10016.

CAREER: Writer. Has worked as neurologist's assistant, legal secretary, curriculum director for a media activism center, and teacher of Web design.

WRITINGS:

The Artist of the Missing, illustrated by Stephen Alcorn, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1999.

Haussmann, or, The Distinction: A Novel, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Luminous Airplanes (working title), a novel about the history of aviation, meteorology and American stand-up comedians.

SIDELIGHTS: Paul LaFarge's first novel, The Artist of the Missing, is set in an unspecified place and time. A young man named Frank has lost his parents, who have either died or gone missing. He is raised by the family of his friend, James, and the two young men move into a boarding house near the sea run by Mrs. Bellaway. Frank and Mrs. Bellaway's daughter elope, and Frank begins working in the family's laundry. Frank learns to draw, and when he meets and falls in love with Prudence, a forensic photographer, he begins sketching the faces of missing people displayed on posters. Prudence is unable to commit to the relationship and Frank becomes abandoned for the third time.

A woman who is grieving over a lost loved one contacts Frank and introduces him to her friends, revolutionaries who hold salons. He draws pictures of their missing and others from verbal character descriptions they provide, rather than from physical descriptions or pictures. He is arrested by police who claim his portrayals could cause social unrest. Jonathan Coe wrote in the New York Times Book Review that the arrest is "never satisfactorily explained, even within the novel's skewed logic." Frank is accused of being an anarchist, a nihilist, and a solipsist. Coe said the narrative then "turns all Kafkaesque." Frank goes to prison, where he is allowed only a notebook and is forbidden to draw while his work is praised and exhibited on the outside. He is confined for years until a flood destroys the prison and much of the city.

Frank then gets a job in a factory that makes life-size dolls and comes across one called Alpine Monique that closely resembles Prudence. He steals it and takes it home, where the doll begins talking to him. Coe said that at this point, "the reader is pretty much floundering, with only the cool discipline of LaFarge's prose and occasional bursts of wit to stop the proceedings from dissolving into incoherence." Coe wrote that The Artist of the Missing "plays tricky variations on the concept of justice and flirts with the notion that art can provoke social upheaval. It does all this with some elan and imaginative audacity, not to mention a fine disdain for the confines of realism." Booklist reviewer Ellie Barta-Moran called it a "tale of magical realism."

A Publishers Weekly reviewer called the novel a "multilayered achievement . . . both comic and touching, a feverish fantasy disguised as a political allegory disguised as a Borgesian work of fiction disguised as a dream." Dan Cryer wrote in Newsday that "spiraling into infinity, the novel generates stories within stories. . . . Stephen Alcorn's black-and-white relief-block prints harmoniously illustrate this fairy-tale mode. . . . a remarkably fluid prose and narration without a hint of self-importance."

LaFarge's second novel, Haussmann, or, The Distinction, recounts the story of Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann, prefect of the Seine from 1853 to 1869 and architectural planner of modern Paris. LaFarge's story of the prefect goes beyond Haussmann's role as city planner to his involvement in a love affair and political scandal. A Publishers Weekly contributor described LaFarge's tale "as much an enlightening history of Paris as it is a tragic, affecting love story. An astonishing amount of research, a believable tone and a captivating story all come together to make this work a stunning success."