Venice, 1958. Peggy Guggenheim, heiress and now legendary art collector, sits in the sun at her white marble palazzo on the Grand Canal. She's in a reflective mood, thinking back on her thrilling, tragic, nearly impossible journey from her sheltered, old-fashioned family in New York to here: iconoclast and independent woman.
Her prose on those pages that she pored over the longest positively gleams with an electric brio ... An insightful and entertaining, if often disturbing, look at a woman who fought to be recognized on her own terms.
A powerfully subversive delight ... Writing in a lean, pared prose, Godfrey captures both the intense highs and the staggering lows of Guggenheim’s life ... While the novel is lovely and carefully crafted, there is a slight rawness in places ... While this might be due to the collaborative nature of the project (and Jamison’s reluctance to alter any of the work Godfrey left behind), it can more fully — and forgivingly — be ascribed to the nature of the narrative voice and the structure of the book.
As a novel, Peggy invites the reader to glimpse things partly visible, almost but not entirely obscured by layers of interpretation and implication. It is beautifully written, boldly imagined and full of holes—aspects of Guggenheim’s life and persona that Godfrey and then Jamison decided to leave out or touch on only briefly ... Since Godfrey is not around to discuss her decisions about what’s left in and what’s left out, and didn’t even get to write her own list of sources and acknowledgments (her husband reconstructed those as best he could), we can only look to Jamison, who writes that Godfrey had told her she envisioned a happy ending. She said she wanted to give Peggy 'some bliss and triumph.' For a while, Jamison says, she had a tough time seeing how that was going to work. But she pulls it off, brilliantly, in the epilogue set in Venice ... If, like Jamison (and indeed, like me), you are ready to begin your own Peggy Guggenheim research project, Peggy is an excellent place to start.
