TUTEN, Frederic 1936-

PERSONAL: Born December 2, 1936, in New York, NY; son of Rex and Madelyn (Scelfo) Tuten; married Simona Morini (a writer), September 9, 1962 (divorced, 1972); married Elke Krajewska, November, 1996. Education: College of the City of New York (now City College of the City University of New York), B.A., 1959; New York University, M.A., 1964, Ph.D., 1971.

ADDRESSES: Agent—Watkins Loomis Agency, 133 East 35 St., Suite 1, New York, NY 10016. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: City College of the City University of New York, New York, NY, instructor, 1963-70, assistant professor, 1971-1975, associate professor, 1975-85, professor of English, 1985—, director of graduate English and creative writing program, 1974-79, 1984-95. University of Paris, Paris, France, visiting professor, 1979, 1981-83.

MEMBER: Modern Language Association, Melville Society, Popular Culture Association, P.E.N.

AWARDS, HONORS: Guggenheim fellowship in creative writing, 1973-1974; DAAD Award, 1997-1998; Distinguished Writing Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2000.

WRITINGS:

(Translator, with wife, Simona Morini) G. R. Solari, The House of Farnese, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1968.

(Translator, with Simona Morini) Charles Baudelaire: Letters from His Youth, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1970.

The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (fiction), Citadel (Sacramento, CA), 1971.

Tallien: A Brief Romance, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1988.

Roy Lichtenstein Bronze Sculpture, 1976-1989: May 19-July 1, 1989, 65 Thompson Street (New York, NY), 1989.

Tintin in the New World (romance), Morrow (New York, NY), 1993.

Van Gogh's Bad Cafe: A Love Story, Morrow (New York, NY), 1997.

The Green Hour: A Novel, Norton (New York, NY), 2002.

Short fiction included in anthologies and journals, including Tri-Quarterly, Fiction, and Statements: An Anthology of Recent American Fiction; contributor to periodicals, including Art in America, Vogue, and Artforum; book editor for Artforum, 1983-1985.

SIDELIGHTS: Frederic Tuten's novels are well-known for being experimental, often mixing historical figures within the contexts of his own invented fictions. "I never wanted to write a first-person, autobiographical novel," Tuten once told Wendy Smith in Publishers Weekly. "I wanted, as a challenge, to do something totally distinct from anything I supposedly had lived or knew except in my mind."

When Tuten submitted the manuscript for his first novel, The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, editors were reluctant to publish the unusually nonlinear and intellectually challenging work. "It was universally disdained," Tuten told Smith; "the nicest comment was, 'This is not a novel.'" However, after Tuten's friend, Roy Lichtenstein, agreed to do the cover, the book was published and slowly gained a small following. Tuten wrote in Archipelago that he was "taken by the idea of an impersonal fiction, one whose personality was the novel's and not apparently that of its author, an ironic work impervious to irony, its tone a matte gun-metal gray with just a flash of color here and there to warm the reader."

After the publication of The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, Tuten busied himself with his other work, including teaching at New York City College and writing for various art magazines. He also received a Guggenheim fellowship. After a seventeen-year break from writing fiction, Tuten published his second novel, Tallien: A Brief Romance, which New York Times Book Review's James A. Snead called "an exceptionally erudite and often witty meditation on political and erotic betrayal." Tallien is framed by the story of a son dealing with his dying father; the essence of the book, however, is the fictionalized story of Jean Lambert Tallien, a real-life French revolutionary. Tuten's narrative shifts back and forth between 18th-century France and the present day.

Like Tallien and Mao, Tuten's next novel, Tintin in the New World, draws upon a previously existing character—in this case, the beloved comic-strip teenager created by the Belgian cartoonist Herge. Tuten told Smith, "Tintin was a ready-made boy hero I could invest lots of fantasy in. I didn't have to create an unknown youth who was innocent and valiant; he was already there for me, and I could build on that to create the kind of ennobled and mystical reacher for truth I wanted to have." Tuten throws his Tintin in with the characters from Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain, a bunch of European expatriates living near Macchu Picchu in Peru, and watches as the eternal boy-hero struggles with the emerging adult issues of sexuality, sin, and philosophy. Although some critics found the discord to be forced, many were impressed by the sheer inventiveness of the story and the excellence of the writing. Tom De Haven, in Artforum International, particularly appreciated that "the entire enterprise, this invention, is so bizarre in its plunderings (why Tintin? why Mann?) and so unapologetically itself."

With the publication of his fourth novel, Van Gogh's Bad Cafe, critics noted that Tuten's impersonal intellectualism was beginning to expand into a more openly emotional style. "I'm giving myself permission to burn on the page," Tuten told Smith; "I'm much more inclined toward passion in fiction: obvious passion, not subdued and wrestled to the ground." The passion in Van Gogh's Bad Cafe is still presented with Tuten's characteristic juxtapositions of the familiar and unfamiliar: in this surrealistic novel, Tuten follows his time-traveling heroine, Ursula, through her dual life as Vincent Van Gogh's lover and as a late-20th-century New Yorker. In Review of Contemporary Fiction, Philip Landon commented on the "hallucinatory, anachronistic form of the novel" and noted that it "intelligently contemplates the validity of the aesthetic in an age that has threatened to strike art silent." As with his previous novels, many critics admired the provocative writing style. "A stylistic tour de force, the novel is exuberantly baroque," commented John Taylor in Antioch Review. "Here is an oft-hilarious satire of contemporary America and a heady spoof on the classical menage-a-trois."

Booklist's Donna Seaman called Tuten's next novel, The Green Hour, an "intellectual romance" that "artfully ponders the reconditeness of love." Here Tuten explores love, passion, art, and death through the eyes of his heroine Dominique, a brilliant art historian. Despite her successful career and her love for her work, Dominique is unable to disentangle herself from an old lover who reappears periodically throughout her life. The Green Hour, however, is "no ordinary love story," wrote a Publishers Weekly reviewer; "the novel, while a study of character, embraces art and culture as integral elements."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Book Review, July, 1989, review of Tallien: A Brief Romance, p. 21.

Antioch Review, fall, 1997, John Taylor, review of Van Gogh's Bad Cafe, p. 498.

Artforum International, summer, 1993, Tom De Haven, review of Tintin in the New World, p. 103.

Booklist, May 15, 1993, review of Tintin in the New World, p. 1676; March 1, 1997, Donna Seaman, review of Van Gogh's Bad Cafe, p. 1112; September 1, 2002, Donna Seaman, review of The Green Hour, p. 61.

Book World, July 4, 1993, review of Tintin in the New World, p. 2.

Guardian Weekly, January 29, 1988, review of Tallien: A Brief Romance, p. 27; August 8, 1993, review of Tintin in the New World, p. 20.

Hungry Mind Review, fall, 1993, review of Tintin in the New World, p. 32.

Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 1988, review of Tallien: A Brief Romance, p. 156; March 15, 1993, review of Tintin in the New World, p. 330; December 15, 1996, review of Van Gogh's Bad Cafe, p. 1765; July 15, 2002, review of The Green Hour, pp. 991-992.

Library Journal, March 15, 1988, review of Tallien: A Brief Romance, p. 69; June 15, 1993, review of Tintin in the New World, p. 99; February 1, 1997, Starr E. Smith, review of Van Gogh's Bad Cafe, p. 108.

Listener, February 9, 1989, review of Tallien: A Brief Romance, p. 24; April 15, 1997, review of The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, p. 125.

Locus, July, 1993, review of Tintin in the New World, p. 46.

London Review of Books, December 2, 1993, review of Tintin in the New World, p. 28; April 6, 1995, review of Tallien: A Brief Romance, p. 25.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 15, 1988, review of Tallien: A Brief Romance, p. 3; June 6, 1993, review of Tintin in the New World, p. 3; March 23, 1997, review of Van Gogh's Bad Cafe, p. 2.

New Statesman, December 5, 1997, review of Van Gogh's Bad Cafe, p. 42.

New York Times Book Review, May 29, 1988, James A. Snead, review of Tallien: A Brief Romance, p. 15; December 5, 1993, review of Tintin in the New World, p. 65; June 6, 1993, review of Tintin in the New World, p. 9; February 26, 1995, review of Tallien: A Brief Romance, p. 28; February 25, 1996, review of Tintin in the New World, p. 32; March 20, 1997, review of Van Gogh's Bad Cafe, p. 16.

Observer (London, England), October 10, 1993, review of Tintin in the New World, p. 20; January 19, 1999, review of Van Gogh's Bad Cafe, p. 14.

Publishers Weekly, March 11, 1988, review of Tallien: A Brief Romance, p. 87; April 19, 1993, review of Tintin in the New World, p. 49; December 11, 1995, review of Tintin in the New World, p. 69; December 2, 1996, review of Van Gogh's Bad Cafe, p. 38; February 17, 1997, review of The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, p. 217; March 3, 1997, Wendy Smith, "Frederic Tuten: Novels of Feeling and Fine Art," pp. 50-51; July 8, 2002, review of The Green Hour, p. 27.

Rapport: The Modern Guide to Books, Music & More, Volume 20, number 1, 1997, review of Van Gogh's Bad Cafe, p. 15.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall, 1988, review of Tallien: A Brief Romance, p. 161; fall, 1993, Eamonn Wall, review of Tintin in the New World, p. 211; fall, 1997, Philip Landon, review of Van Gogh's Bad Cafe, pp. 234-235.

Times Literary Supplement, November 12, 1993, review of Tintin in the New World, p. 22.

Village Voice Literary Supplement, July, 1985, review of The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, p. 15; May, 1993, reviews of The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, Tallien: A Brief Romance, and Tintin in the New World, p. 29.

ONLINE

Archipelago Web site,http://www.archipelago.org/ (March 3, 2003), Frederic Tuten, "Twenty-Five Years After: The Adventures of Mao on the Long March."

City College of New York Web site,http://www.ccny.cuny.edu/ (March 3, 2003), biography of Frederic Tuten.

W. W. Norton Web site,http://www.wwnorton.com/ (March 3, 2003), description of The Green Hour.