Antonia Logue's Shadow-Box blends historical fact with imaginative fiction in a sometimes awkward but ultimately compelling mix. Working in her favor is a cast of characters unlike any other. Mina Loy, the painter and Dadaist poet notorious for her beauty, her love affairs, and her flamboyant home-made hats; her husband, Arthur Cravan, a semi-professional boxer, art critic, and loup garou of polite society; and Cravan's friend Jack Johnson, Heavyweight Champion of the World on the eve of World War I, when being a black boxer meant facing death threats and abuse. Theirs is an extraordinary story, featuring cameos from art-world luminaries like Marinetti and Duchamp, and chronicling a passion as grand on the page as it was in real life.

The novel begins in 1946, 30 years after Cravan disappeared off the coast of Guatemala, as Mina and Jack begin a late-life correspondence. Reflective and far-ranging, their letters both recount their life stories and attempt to come to terms with the enigmatic figure of Cravan. Jack and Mina's voices too often sound alike, and the epistolary premise occasionally wears thin ("I was worried you might not write back--I'm glad you wrote back so fast. You're right in what you said. All the stuff we know about each other and we don't really know a damned thing..."). But there are other passages that ring both poetic and true to the historical characters they portray, as when Marinetti declares himself to Mina: 'Mrs Haweis, alone with stokers feeding the hellish fires of great ships, alone with black spectres who grope in the red-hot bellies of locomotives launched on their crazy courses, alone with drunkards reeling like wounded birds along the city walls, alone, it is you that I have come for Mrs Haweis, you alone.' A few pages into each chapter, the narrative's sheer momentum takes over, and the reader is immersed in a world of boxing rings and surrealist salons, bullfights, and high modernist art. Believable, beautifully researched, this is a first novel of astonishing confidence and range. Look for great things in Logue's future. --Mary Park


From Publishers Weekly
The dual metaphor of shadow-box (a shallow container to display items/to spar with an imaginary opponent) figures luminously in Irish writer Logue's notable debut, an epistolary novel focusing on a trio of outrageous historical figures whose adventures span three continents and two world wars, spawning acquaintance with such notables as Marcel Duchamp and William Carlos Williams. Logue imagines the 1946 correspondence between celebrated modernist poet Mina Loy and Jack Johnson, legendary black heavyweight boxing champion. What could they possibly have in common? The answer is Arthur Cravan, writer, critic, surrealist gadfly, nephew of Oscar Wilde, semiprofessional boxer and either the prototypical performance artist of this century or an unregenerate con man. Among his finest "works" was a faux prizefight he and Johnson once staged in Barcelona to raise money for Cravan's passage to America. In New York, he courted Loy, their passionate affair culminating in a Mexican marriage at which Johnson served as best man. Shortly thereafter, Cravan disappeared, reportedly drowned off the Guatemalan coast. Decades later, Loy and Johnson's letters detail their life stories and many painful, nostalgic Cravan anecdotes, each trying to make sense of their cumulative losses and triumphs. This correspondence between a brilliant femme fatale and a debauched egotist veers toward self-justification, self-promotion and self-obsession. Johnson relates bitter, blow-by-blow accounts of his battles in and out of the ring; Loy counters with tales of her daring escape from societal and marital chains, and her assault on literary mores. Several missives are included from the notorious Cravan, and his and Loy's daughter, Fabienne, but it is Johnson and Loy's vivid, excitable voices that breathe life into characters who seem fully engaged only when they are on public display. Logue's depiction of their world, where even the shadows are shadowboxing, is imaginatively conceived and elegantly executed. (Aug.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Logue, a young Irish writer, makes an impressive debut with this ambitious first novel. The story unfolds through the letters of celebrated modernist poet and artist Mina Loy and Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion of the world. Mina and Jack met nearly 30 years earlier at Mina's wedding to boxer, art critic, and Dadaist Arthur Cravan, nephew of Oscar Wilde. Shortly after their marriage, Cravan left pregnant Mina on a Mexican beach and sailed off to Chile to avoid World War I. In their letters, beginning in 1946, Mina and Jack relive their lives up until they met Cravan and share what has happened since. The plot is far reaching and historically accurate; Logue is adept at giving unique voices to Mina and Jack and effectively conveying the story through their correspondence, offering the reader a unique perspective on the social, artistic, and political climate in the United States and abroad in the early part of the century. For all libraries.ADianna Moeller, OCLC/WLN Pacific Northwest Svc. Ctr., Lacey, WA Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
An exuberant, audacious debut inspired by the extraordinary life of Mina Loy, a modernist poet and painter prominent in the century's first decades. The story is composed of a series of lengthy letters exchanged in 1946 between the by-then elderly Loy and the great boxer Jack Johnson, who became, in 1908, the first black heavyweight champion of the world, now living in exile. Theyre tied together by their mutual fascination with Arthur Cravan, the nephew of Oscar Wilde; Cravan had been the great love of Loy's life and one of Johnson's closest friends. At heart here is the mystery of Cravan's disappearance; soon after marrying Loy in 1918, Cravan vanished while sailing and was presumed drowned. Loy's letters to Johnson offer a swift-paced, vivid memoir, first of her life before Cravan, and then of her short, intense life with him. Loy, a great, rather ethereal beauty, spent her early years as a participant in many of the most revolutionary artistic movements: a painter herself, she was for a time the lover of Henri Matisse; a poet and essayist, she had a turbulent affair with Marinetti, the Italian Futurist. Irish writer Logue does a deft job of catching the intellectual excitement and controversy surrounding the arts in the preWWI period, and her glimpses of its luminariesfrom Matisse to Apollinaire to Mabel Dodge to Marcel Duchampare witty and convincing. As a counterpoint to Loys recollections are Johnson's frank, vibrant letters about his intensely controversial career, the profound racism that he battled, and its sad costs. Cravan, an art critic, semiprofessional boxer, and tireless advocate of the new, remains a somewhat shadowy figure here, more important for having been so intensely loved then for his own achievements. Other voices emerge briefly, including that of Fabienne, Loy's daughter by Cravan, and, most audaciously, of Cravan himself. Logue's version of his actual fate provides a bittersweet coda. A wonderful portrait of the modern avant-garde in its youth, and a complex, intensely romantic narrative of a great passion and its lingering effects. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
?Every once in a while an astounding new talent makes its presence felt on the literary stage. Antonia Logue is undoubtedly one of these talents.?
?Toronto Star

?A fearless excursion into the nature of passion, through the blood-sports of boxing, poetry, and art.?A work of astonishing acuity.?
?Merilyn Simonds

?Shadow-Box achieves the delicate alchemical reaction by which brute reality is converted into glittering, fictional gold.?
?The Times (U.K.)

?An exuberant, audacious debut??
?Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

?She floors the reader in the first seconds and lets you get up only to dazzle you with dancing and floating, feinting and impeccable combinations.?
?Globe and Mail

?Immediately engrossing.?Its impact, like the best poetry or a powerful left hook, is visceral, intense, and enduring.?
?Time Out New York

?Logue?s sentences fulminate with vigour and assurance. . . . [She] has a fluid, wide-ranging pen and creates hard-assed fight scenes as easily as languid recall of lovers? first meetings.?
?The Observer (U.K.)

?This is a furious novel about fighters and poets, fists and decadence, art and rage.?The humming, floating, stinging energy of her Jack Johnson pages suggest that Logue is a natural writer.?Logue knows how to carve a sentence packed with gusto. . . .?
?Montreal Gazette

?Ambitious and wide-ranging.?An enjoyable and entertaining novel.??
?Times Literary Supplement

?Imaginatively conceived and elegantly executed.?
?Publishers Weekly (starred review)

?Remarkable.??
?Booklist (starred review)

?Logue?s writing is boldly descriptive and strikingly true.?With Shadow-Box Antonia Logue has given us a story that is exciting, significant, and beautifully told.?
?Uptown Magazine

?A mesmerizing, beautifully written story??
?Sunday Independent (U.K.)

??Outstanding.?Any writer who can blend boxing and undying love, Dadaism and racism, mad desire and maddening loneliness to such remarkable effect is certainly one to watch.?
?Scotland on Sunday

?Ambitious?[Antonia Logue] has raised some interesting questions about the balance between great art and life, and the price always mercilessly extracted.?
-The Irish Times

FROM OUR EDITORS

Most first novels -- especially, let's face it, first novels by young women -- are of the coming-of-age variety, detailing the sexual, emotional, and/or familial complications of childhood and adolescence. But 20-something Irish novelist Antonia Logue's Shadow-Box is far from a typical first effort. Like Martha Cooley's 1998 debut, The Archivist (which used the life of controversial poet T. S. Eliot as a jumping-off point for fiction), Shadow-Box is a sophisticated tale of love, loss, and loyalty between famous historical figures.

Logue's protagonists all are drawn from real life in America and Europe just after the turn of the 20th century. Jack Johnson was the first black heavyweight champion of the world, a man simultaneously admired, feared, and reviled by a celebrity-hungry culture that hadn't even begun to recognize its own racism, or its need to destroy heroes. An amazingly gifted athlete who maintained an unbeaten fight record until 1915, when he took a "dive" in a bout with Jess Willard (the "Great White Hope"), Jack is now, in 1946, struggling to come to terms with his fateful decision, and with the boozing, womanizing, and rage that characterized his youth. He seeks out a woman he used to know, a woman who was married passionately to his cohort, Arthur Craven, a semiprofessional boxer, surrealist, and nephew of Oscar Wilde. That woman was Mina Loy, the elegant British-born poet who had become the confidante of such legendary figures as Marcel Duchamp and William Carlos Williams. Perhaps at the instigation of Craven -- long believed dead -- Jack begins writing to the poet and she to him; their letters serve to elucidate their pasts to each other, and more importantly, to themselves.

This clever, epistolary form allows Logue to chronicle the social, political, and artistic mores of the time; Mina and Jack have both lived throughout the world and, because they were of different classes, genders, and races, they're able to present various worldviews to the reader. Mina is a wellborn Englishwoman who had had one husband and several lovers before Craven (whom she called by his "artistic" name, Fabien); after the death of her first child, she became restless and sought catharsis, first through painting and then through poetry. (The illustrious socialite, Mabel Dodge, was her first patron.) In these heady times in Paris and New York, Mina fell in with the likes of Duchamp, Marinetti (who was, briefly, her lover), Williams, and, eventually, Craven. Jack, for his part, was a scrapper with a great athletic gift; as he tells of being turned away from hotels and nightclubs and scorned by the press for a) overpowering white men and b) romancing white women, we get a sense of the rage that fueled him and the era bent on his destruction. But Jack is far more than brainless brawn; he's analytical and movingly astute. Having agreed to throw the fight in exchange for an empty promise from promoters to see his dying mother, Johnson writes of his humiliating double cross: "I was what I had always made other people, defeated."

Such simple, pure observations of human behavior recur throughout this novel, which is why the book turns out to be much more than a history lesson (though as such, it is also fascinating) Mina, understandably, is given to a poetical sort of introspection, and if her language may seem to some a bit high-blown, she (through Logue) resonantly evokes the pain of love and loss. "The grief still flicks its residue in my eye each morning when I wake," she writes to Jack of her grief over Craven's presumed death. "Or sometimes later, as I arrange my hair or dab my pulses with scent." She is also frank about how little-known she has become: "Nor does anyone else [remember me], my days of praise and glory ended a long time ago. It is Bill who became famous, quiet, gentle Bill and my tormentor Marianne Moore." Both of her time and ahead of it, Antonia Logue's Mina Loy is every woman who has ever made hard choices, won great praise, and suffered huge losses.

Who should read this stunning novel that rivals the great Ragtime for its seamless weaving of fact and fiction? Anyone who ever saw the movie "The Great White Hope" or read poetry by Loy or Williams or Moore. Anyone who ever felt misunderstood by spouse, family, or society. Anyone who ever desired fame or love. In other words, anyone who likes fiction to tell the truth about the universal joys and disappointments of life, no matter the era.

—Sara Nelson

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Antonia Logue's first novel is already being acclaimed around the world as one of the year's most auspicious debuts, a work of rich and complex flavor and dazzling imagination that establishes her as an outstanding new writer. It is a sweeping story of love and friendship centered around the mysterious Arthur Cravan - semiprofessional boxer, surrealist manque, influential art critic, legendary bon vivant, nephew of Oscar Wilde. In 1908 Jack Johnson was crowned the first black heavyweight champion of the world - to the great chagrin of the American public, scandalized by his fast cars, debauchery, taste for white women, and the fact that he couldn't be beaten. Forced to flee to Europe to escape being jailed on trumped-up charges, he met Cravan, and together they dreamed up a brilliant scam to get Cravan to New York: they staged a fight to pay for his passage. Soon Cravan was shocking the arts patrons of New York society with a futurist manifesto-cum-drunken rant that landed him in jail - his antics egged on by friends such as Marcel Duchamp and William Carlos Williams. But Cravan's time in New York also gave rise to a passionate love affair with the celebrated poet Mina Loy. Theirs was a great love, interrupted by a great war. They had an idyllic wedding in Mexico, and them Cravan - fleeing conscription into the army - sailed into a hurricane and was presumed dead. From this remarkable story, Antonia Logue has fashioned a truly extraordinary novel. Letters between Jack and Mina beginning in 1946 sketch this expansive tale of love, art, and boxing, ranging across the United States and Europe in the era of tremendous social, artistic, and political upheaval before and during World War II.

FROM THE CRITICS

Eve Claxton - Time Out New York

In the Shadow Box Logue felt an addiction when writing the book. There was not a single interest that lured me into it, she explains. It just developed, but so strongly that once I got into it, I couldn't leave it alone. Readers may encounter a similar problem. Shadow Box is a novel with such momentum, it can be read in only a few sittings. Its impact, like the best poetry or a powerful left hook, is visceral, intense and enduring.

Publishers Weekly

The dual metaphor of shadow-box (a shallow container to display items/to spar with an imaginary opponent) figures luminously in Irish writer Logue's notable debut, an epistolary novel focusing on a trio of outrageous historical figures whose adventures span three continents and two world wars, spawning acquaintance with such notables as Marcel Duchamp and William Carlos Williams. Logue imagines the 1946 correspondence between celebrated modernist poet Mina Loy and Jack Johnson, legendary black heavyweight boxing champion. What could they possibly have in common? The answer is Arthur Cravan, writer, critic, surrealist gadfly, nephew of Oscar Wilde, semiprofessional boxer and either the prototypical performance artist of this century or an unregenerate con man. Among his finest "works" was a faux prizefight he and Johnson once staged in Barcelona to raise money for Cravan's passage to America. In New York, he courted Loy, their passionate affair culminating in a Mexican marriage at which Johnson served as best man. Shortly thereafter, Cravan disappeared, reportedly drowned off the Guatemalan coast. Decades later, Loy and Johnson's letters detail their life stories and many painful, nostalgic Cravan anecdotes, each trying to make sense of their cumulative losses and triumphs. This correspondence between a brilliant femme fatale and a debauched egotist veers toward self-justification, self-promotion and self-obsession. Johnson relates bitter, blow-by-blow accounts of his battles in and out of the ring; Loy counters with tales of her daring escape from societal and marital chains, and her assault on literary mores. Several missives are included from the notorious Cravan, and his and Loy's daughter, Fabienne, but it is Johnson and Loy's vivid, excitable voices that breathe life into characters who seem fully engaged only when they are on public display. Logue's depiction of their world, where even the shadows are shadowboxing, is imaginatively conceived and elegantly executed. (Aug.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Logue, a young Irish writer, makes an impressive debut with this ambitious first novel. The story unfolds through the letters of celebrated modernist poet and artist Mina Loy and Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion of the world. Mina and Jack met nearly 30 years earlier at Mina's wedding to boxer, art critic, and Dadaist Arthur Cravan, nephew of Oscar Wilde. Shortly after their marriage, Cravan left pregnant Mina on a Mexican beach and sailed off to Chile to avoid World War I. In their letters, beginning in 1946, Mina and Jack relive their lives up until they met Cravan and share what has happened since. The plot is far reaching and historically accurate; Logue is adept at giving unique voices to Mina and Jack and effectively conveying the story through their correspondence, offering the reader a unique perspective on the social, artistic, and political climate in the United States and abroad in the early part of the century. For all libraries.--Dianna Moeller, OCLC/WLN Pacific Northwest Svc. Ctr., Lacey, WA Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An exuberant, audacious debut inspired by the extraordinary life of Mina Loy, a modernist poet and painter prominent in the century's first decades. The story is composed of a series of lengthy letters exchanged in 1946 between the by-then elderly Loy and the great boxer Jack Johnson, who became, in 1908, the first black heavyweight champion of the world, now living in exile. They're tied together by their mutual fascination with Arthur Cravan, the nephew of Oscar Wilde; Cravan had been the great love of Loy's life and one of Johnson's closest friends. At heart here is the mystery of Cravan's disappearance; soon after marrying Loy in 1918, Cravan vanished while sailing and was presumed drowned. Loy's letters to Johnson offer a swift-paced, vivid memoir, first of her life before Cravan, and then of her short, intense life with him. Loy, a great, rather ethereal beauty, spent her early years as a participant in many of the most revolutionary artistic movements: a painter herself, she was for a time the lover of Henri Matisse; a poet and essayist, she had a turbulent affair with Marinetti, the Italian Futurist. Irish writer Logue does a deft job of catching the intellectual excitement and controversy surrounding the arts in the pre￯﾿ﾽWWI period, and her glimpses of its luminaries—from Matisse to Apollinaire to Mabel Dodge to Marcel Duchamp—are witty and convincing. As a counterpoint to Loy's recollections are Johnson's frank, vibrant letters about his intensely controversial career, the profound racism that he battled, and its sad costs. Cravan, an art critic, semiprofessional boxer, and tireless advocate of the new, remains a somewhat shadowy figure here, more important forhaving been so intensely loved then for his own achievements. Other voices emerge briefly, including that of Fabienne, Loy's daughter by Cravan, and, most audaciously, of Cravan himself. Logue's version of his actual fate provides a bittersweet coda. A wonderful portrait of the modern avant-garde in its youth, and a complex, intensely romantic narrative of a great passion and its lingering effects.