The Shadow Catcher Marianne Wiggins

 

“You think you know someone by looking at his face but what can one face say about the thousand thoughts behind those eyes.”

Plot:  A young woman training to be a nurse in late 19th century Minnesota is forced to relocate, with her younger brother, to Seattle after the death of their parents.  Once in Seattle, she marries Edward Curtis, who becomes a controversial ethnographer of native Americans.  A parallel story emerges of Wiggins' investigation into a man claiming to be her long deceased father. 


Why read it?:  The odd setup allows Wiggins to muse on various topics about family history, authenticity, art, and whatever else crosses her mind.  Her mind is interesting.


This is the 3^rd book by Wiggins that I have read; all 3 are completely different and all 3 are exceptional.  Like the other novels I have read by her, this takes place in the late 19^th/early 20^th century.  On a basic level, this is about the early 20^th century photographer/ethnographer Edward Curtis, but that wouldn’t be particularly accurate.  He is the character of the title, but the book rarely includes him.  Much like the people he tried to document, Curtis in this novel is mostly on its edges.  He appears briefly and even then, you never know much more of him other than he keeps to himself, and is not particularly liked by anyone, including his long suffering wife Clara.  Clara is much more the focus of the first half or so of the novel.  The loss of her parents and her life in Minnesota and her life near Seattle in the late 1800’s is greatly detailed up to the point where she becomes involved with the very odd Mr Curtis.

The book is also the story of a writer named Marianne Wiggins who has written a book about Curtis.  It seemed a bit strained at first, as you try to process exactly what is going on, but I bought into it pretty quickly.  Eventually Wiggins ends up in Las Vegas trying to identify a man who has apparently appropriated her long deceased father’s identity.  This gives Wiggins some space to muse on her ancestors and what she knows (or assumes to know) of them based on photos and other documents she has.  Much like Curtis staged and edited his photographs to drive his own version of Native Americans, Wiggins sees much the same progress going on in trying to understand her own ancestors (and Curtis himself, who, based on one photo of himself, is incredibly appealing to a Hollywood film maker). 

Eventually the stories all intersect into one, which I assume is speculative on the author’s part, but is quite unexpected.  But to give her credit, it worked (for me); if you can grant her one or two rather large coincidences, the story comes to a conclusion that is satisfying and makes sense of what we have seen so far.  The veracity of history, and what we can and can not make of it, is a subject of interest to me, explored in Gould’s Book of Fish, and several other works.  Here, Wiggins isn’t exactly critical of the manipulations Curtis made in his photos.  Rather, she sees someone who wasn’t comfortable sharing the details of  his life with anyone, preferring to have his life seen as an ideal.  Perhaps that is what he thought of his subjects.