Word: mccoy
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Hope is an artist who does not fully arrive at herself until she has buried her first two husbands, both of them artists more famous than she, who required a lot of care and feeding. Her first, Zack McCoy, is plainly modeled on Jackson Pollock. The wounded god of Abstract Expressionism, he moves from early struggles in New York City to vexed triumphs on the sunlit east end of Long Island. There McCoy/Pollock has his breakthrough to the drip paintings that bring him fame, which arrives at his door with its jaws open...
...Newman--the anointed gladiators of the American avant-garde. The names are changed, but their vanities and treacheries and barroom intellectual brawls are pretty much as we know them. As for Hope, she resembles Pollock's actual wife, the steadfast Lee Krasner, though not in every detail, especially after McCoy's death, when she marries Guy Holloway, a composite of Pop artists from the '60s, who never quite comes to life...
...also resembles Updike. Sometimes so does McCoy. Is it his own face that Updike is asking us to seek? Maybe McCoy is his wished-for self, diving into the volcano of instinct. But it's Hope who has his gift for rustling language. When she remembers the way her German-born art instructor spoke a "ponderous slow English, like concrete dripping in clumps inside a turning mixer," what you recall is that reading Updike has always provided the pleasures you hoped were in store when you went to the trouble of learning to read...
Hope resembles Updike too in her yearning to reach for transcendent states by way of the things of this world--food, landscape, pigment and, of course, sex. What she loves first about McCoy is not his art but the lean arc of his body and the feral escarpments of his face, with its "lovely low-relief episodes of muscle." If this is a novel in which people think and talk, it's a frisky one all the same. "I'm not terribly up on the actual sex lives of these artists," Updike admits, "except that they were sexy and they...
...accounting investigation and is struggling to raise $1 billion from asset sales to stay afloat. But as Elan's chairman and CEO Donal Geaney stepped down last week, along with deputy chairman Tom Lynch, their gloom had not really spread to the rest of Ireland's economy. Danny McCoy, economist at Dublin's Economic and Social Research Institute, notes that the troubles of multinationals like Elan "haven't been that destabilizing because there isn't a huge public exposure to the stock market," and because Ireland remains a destination for firms eager to service the European market. Ireland...