New West Book Review

Disappearing Dads: Marianne Wiggins’ “The Shadow Catcher”

By Jenny Shank, 7-05-07

The Shadow Catcher
By Marianne Wiggins
Simon & Schuster
323 pages, $25

In her new novel, The Shadow Catcher, Marianne Wiggins wrestles with the legacy of one of the American West’s greatest myth-makers, the photographer Edward S. Curtis, whose sepia-toned portraits of Native Americans in traditional dress still turn up in rest stop postcard kiosks and continue to shape the way that many people envision Indians as they used to be.  But that isn’t all the National Book Award-nominated novelist does in this book.  She accomplishes her tale through a daring blend of autobiography, historical fiction, art criticism, road trip narrative, and social commentary about modern day life in the West. 

“The Shadow Catcher” begins with a writer named Marianne Wiggins (who shares some key details of the author’s life) stuck in L.A. traffic on her way to meet with a movie producer about the novel she wrote about Edward Curtis’ life.  In this novel, Wiggins doesn’t varnish Curtis’ story.  He abandoned his wife and children and drove them into debt through his single-minded pursuit of his travels and art.  And although his photos have the reputation for accurately depicting what Curtis called “The Vanishing Race,” in fact, as the Wiggins character explains to the producer:

“Curtis would take one Indian from one tribe, a Piegan let’s say and dress him up in Assiniboin regalia, and that was fine by him.  Dressing Navajos as Siouxes.  But if there was any totem of modernity--a car, a clock, a zipper or a waistcoat, Curtis would do everything he could to guarantee it was erased.”

The photos were not taken, “as you’re led to believe, when the tribes were roaming the Plains, hunting buffalo,” but in the twentieth century, after they had been “herded onto reservations.”

Of course, as the Wiggins character predicts, the producer doesn’t care about any of this.  Like many chroniclers of the West, the filmmakers want to “print the legend” instead of the thorny truth.  The Shadow Catcher contains dozens of black-and-white photos throughout (Wiggins notes that this is an homage to W.G. Sebald, but it also reminded me of Carole Maso’s innovative 1990 novel, The Art Lover).  When the Wiggins character shows the producer a photo of the handsome Curtis, she gushes, “How could someone who looks like this and risks his life to make gorgeous images of Indians not be perfect for a movie?  How tall was he?”

After the meeting, Wiggins receives a call from a hospital in Las Vegas from a nurse who says an eighty-year-old man who is apparently her father is dying in the cardiac unit.  In reality, Wiggins’ father abandoned his family and killed himself thirty years earlier, but she feels compelled to investigate, thus beginning the road trip portion of the novel.

Next, Wiggins takes the reader back in time to the third-person perspective of Clara Curtis, Edward’s long-suffering wife.  In Wiggins’ telling, (which seems to stick to facts in some moments and fictionalize other parts) Clara came from a loving home with two artist parents and was forced to set out with her little brother to live in Washington state when her parents were killed in an accident.  This section has the transportive power of great historical fiction; once I started Clara’s story I couldn’t surface from it until I’d finished it.  Clara falls in love with the dashing Curtis, a man who loves nothing but his work and takes advantage of Clara’s practical skills to launch his business. 

After the story of Clara and Edward’s unconventional courtship, Wiggins launches forward to her modern day road trip to Vegas.  Each section is so seamless that these transitions between radically different times and places aren’t jarring.  The Clara story unfolds in a way that’s easy to settle into, while the Wiggins parts are more bracing, and frequently funny. 
She muses, for example, about the great American superhighway, which were built “for the mandated task of hauling freight across long distances as fast as possible with no unnecessary stops…Haul ass was the mantra of the new inter-state of being, so we got these monster roads where no roads had gone before…” Wiggins writes so incisively (and entertainingly) about roads, the ridiculousness of Las Vegas, the cowboy-and-Indian television shows of her youth, and the transformation of the West that Edward Abbey would be proud.

Somehow, Wiggins weaves all the threads of her book together into a flawless tapestry that deviates from historical fact. (Wiggins includes a plot thread that reveals Edward Curtis to have been gay, and suggests that the boating accident in which Clara Curtis died was a suicide.) It is in these moments that Wiggins’ powers as a novelist are at their height; she is fashioning her own legends, but they feel like truth.  Even more importantly, Wiggins finds a way to reflect on her own abandonment by her father through examining the life of Curtis.  It’s almost as though Wiggins has tapped into Joseph Cambells’ ideas that all people’s stories, no matter how disparate, share commonalities on the level of myth.

At one point, Clara recalls her father’s thoughts on the qualities that produce successful artists: “Talent, her father used to say, is more abundant than you think.  You have to have the temperament to tolerate hard work.  You have to flirt with luck.  You have to take the chances that most people wouldn’t take.” In The Shadow Catcher, Wiggins has taken chances that most writers wouldn’t, daring to elevate the facts of her own life to the level of myth and poking holes in standard Western legends, and in doing so has produced an engrossing and compelling novel.

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