Peggy

Starred review from June 17, 2024
This magnificent posthumous novel from Godfrey (Under the Bridge), completed after her death in 2022 by Jamison, concerns the life of heiress and arts patron Peggy Guggenheim. Following her father’s death on the Titanic (a loss compounded by the embarrassing public knowledge that he was accompanied on the voyage by his mistress), Peggy grows increasingly interested in modern art, a passion she shared with her father. She escapes the confines of New York society for Paris in 1920, an invitation from artist Laurence Vail having “put a face on my hope” for a new life. Godfrey covers Peggy’s notable acquisitions and rescue of important modern artworks on the eve of Nazi occupation, and she peppers in appearances from dozens of Peggy’s real-life friends, lovers, and colleagues, including Man Ray, Djuna Barnes, and Emma Goldman. The heart of the novel, though, lies in Godfrey’s depiction of her subject’s evolving mindset. In lively first-person narration, Godfrey captures Peggy’s constant wavering between boldness and self-doubt, between the pull of conventional motherhood and the longing to be free. Looking back on her life at 60, Peggy proudly claims her role in art history: “I could see the start of a new world.... I didn’t make that world. But I helped it survive.” Readers will be won over by Godfrey’s incandescent portrait of a singular woman. Agent: Christy Fletcher, UTA.

August 1, 2024
Rich, restless, driven by "grand dreams" and fears of a family curse, Peggy Guggenheim sets out to find the bohemian life for which she yearns. Godfrey worked on this book for 10 years before dying of cancer in 2022; using the manuscript and notes she left behind, Jamison finished the book, immersing the reader in Godfrey's vision of the intense and willful Guggenheim as she progresses from adolescence to womanhood: "I wanted a future of gangsters or poets; I wanted violence and beauty..." At 14, after her father--traveling with his mistress--dies on board theTitanic, Peggy, her mother, and two sisters must downsize, but they are still wealthy members of New York society, living under Mrs. Guggenheim's expectations of conformity. Peggy, meanwhile, even in her teens is testing the limits of her position, deceiving her mother about what she's studying in school, flirting with both sexes, questing constantly "for another kind of life...A life among artists." A job in an avant-garde bookshop introduces her to some of those creative people, including Laurence Vail, a sculptor known as the King of Bohemia. Moving to Paris, marrying Vail, and having two children with him, Guggenheim begins to claim her chosen identity. More appealing in its earlier, questing, formative half, the novel turns more glamorous and sensational in its later chapters. Guggenheim's friends and many lovers come to the fore, while famous names pervade the text--Man Ray, Hart Crane, Emma Goldman, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett (one of those lovers). Issues of class, antisemitism, modernism, sexuality, women's rights, and politics are discussed, and there's plenty of drama. Peggy's marriage turns abusive; her older sister dies in childbirth, and her younger is accused of killing her two sons after they fall to their deaths. The story concludes as Peggy reaches 40, but a coda set in Venice 20 years later crams in the art purchases for which she is mainly remembered. It's a devoted, creative version of the life, often in romantic thrall to the mercurial, impulsive, insulated figure at its center. A vivid, indulgent imagining of the legendary collector.

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August 1, 2024
Peggy tells her story of the boon and misery of family wealth and the liberation she found in art with descriptive inventiveness and emotional bewilderment. Growing up in New York opulence, she is thwarted in her desire for an education and shadowed by her father's scandalous death on the Titanic. Peggy is hesitant to trust her intelligence and vanguard aesthetics as she awakens to the pleasures and dangers of bohemian life in Paris, suffers through her marriage to the cruel Laurence Vail, breaks free, and embarks on many affairs, most soulfully with Samuel Beckett. The more Peggy allows herself to bask in the sun of creativity, the firmer her resolve to support radical artists. Godfrey focuses on Peggy's coming into her full powers in this deeply empathic fictionalization of art collector and gallerist Peggy Guggenheim's extraordinary life, a lush novel infused with torment, determination, and wit. With keenly drawn characters based on real-life figures and a vivid and illuminating historical context, this bravura projection of Peggy's spirit and dramatization of her adventures, seamlessly completed by Leslie Jamison after Godfrey's death, is enthralling, revealing, and resonant.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.