MEMOIR: UNDERDOG TALES
An Accidental Sportswriter: A Memoir by Robert Lipsyte
In more than 50 years covering sports, longtime New York Times columnist Robert Lipsyte prided himself on being a sportswriter who wasn’t a fan.
A fat, brainy kid who got beat up in grammar school, Lipsyte majored in English at Columbia University and wanted to be a novelist. “Truth was in the sweep of fiction, I thought, not in a string of little facts,” he writes.
But after college, he lucked into a summer job as a copyboy in the Times sports department and fell in love with daily journalism as it was practiced at The Times.
There, with Gay Talese as his mentor, he developed a singular voice that, by temperament and life experience, invariably sided with the underdog. When Lipsyte was rewarded with a column after 10 years of chasing daily news, including his biggest story, Muhammad Ali, he gravitated to stories with a sharp racial or political edge: lacrosse on an Indian reservation; gay athletes coming out.
“I could enjoy the Kentucky Derby . . . as a great horse race, a splendid party and a vignette of Americana only the first couple of times I covered it before issues of class, race and equine exploitation became impossible to ignore,” he writes.
FICTION: A LIFE IN THE TROPICS
The White Woman on the Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey
There’s a point in every tropical vacation where it seems brilliant to stay indefinitely, to stay bronzed and warm, lingering over the local cuisine, believing it’s possible to become a local.
The bloated, leathery, spotted skin of George and Sabine Harwood, the central couple in Monique Roffey’s novel “The White Woman on the Green Bicycle” should serve as a caution against staying in the sun too long.
The British couple moved to Trinidad as newlyweds in 1956, just as the Caribbean island began its transition from a British colony to an independent nation. Through the Harwoods’ turbulent marriage, Roffey explores the harsh legacy of slavery and colonialism, along with the disappointments and corruption that follow.
The novel opens in 2006, far from the tourist beaches. Sabine has suffered too long from the poisoning effects of the sun and a womanizing husband who failed to keep his promise that they would one day return to England. For years, she channeled her frustrations into letters to Eric Williams, whose government reforms captivated Trinidad when she had first arrived.
George’s discovery of her secret trove of letters, never sent, sets in motion a series of unfortunate events that reveal the pervasive racial and economic inequalities in a country that had hoped for something better than the shadow of colonialism.
Trinidad’s racial segregation and the damage sustained by the Harwoods’ marriage are further explored in flashbacks to the couple’s early years on the island, when Sabine gains fame as the white woman who dares to pedal through Port-of-Spain on her green bicycle.
Roffey, born in Trinidad and now living in London, offers no easy way off the island. Instead of depicting the Caribbean’s famously clear blue sea, her novel reflects the harsh glare of a blistering sun on the water. Everyone gets a little burned.
BIOGRAPHY: PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST
Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter: A Life by Patricia Albers
At age 12, Joan Mitchell decided to be a painter. She had shown a flair for writing and for painting, but her father made her choose between the two, warning against being a dilettante.
He needn’t have worried — Joan turned out to be as driven as he was. When Mitchell died in 1992 at age 67, her paintings sold for millions and belonged to major art museums. But her fame came at a terrible price.
A lifelong alcoholic, Mitchell was a nasty drunk, brawling with lovers until she was black and blue. Reckless, promiscuous and self-destructive, she wanted children yet had several abortions because she believed motherhood was incompatible with a career.
Art historian Patricia Albers, who spent eight years on this densely packed, excellent biography, offers a largely sympathetic portrait of Mitchell, uncovering ample evidence of her warmth and generosity, and tracing her outrageous behavior to a variety of unresolved psychological issues.
Born in Chicago, Mitchell grew up in a wealthy family. A championship figure skater as a teen, she went on to study at Smith College and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1949, she moved to New York with her then husband, Barney Rosset Jr., who later founded the legendary Grove Press, at Joan’s suggestion.
They arrived just when a group of artists, later called the New York School, was about to set the world on fire. Mitchell fell under the spell of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, whose bold, large-scale abstractions liberated her from her academic training.
Sometimes called a second-generation abstract expressionist, Mitchell defies such labeling. Although she borrowed their gestures and techniques, her paintings capture remembered landscapes and emotions, not the artist’s inner world.
Fiercely competitive from an early age, Mitchell waged a lifelong battle against sexism. Even her father — who badly wanted a John, not a Joan — told her she’d never amount to much because of her gender. Thus her ironic references to herself as “lady painter,” a sly put-down she used knowing full well that her art deserved to hang alongside that of her more celebrated male contemporaries.
