| Frederic Tuten | |
| Birth Place: | Bronx, New York City, US |
| Nationality: | American |
| Education: | City College of New York National Autonomous University of Mexico New York University (PhD) |
| Period: | 1964–present |
Frederic Tuten is an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. He has written five novels – The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (1971), Tallien: A Brief Romance (1988), Tintin in the New World: A Romance (1993), Van Gogh's Bad Café (1997) and The Green Hour (2002) – as well as one book of inter-related short stories, Self-Portraits: Fictions (2010), and essays, many of the latter being about contemporary art. His memoir My Young Life (2019) was published by Simon & Schuster. In 2022, he published a collection of short stories, The Bar at Twilight, and On a Terrace in Tangier, a book of Tuten's drawings, each drawing accompanied by a short story. Tuten received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction and was given the Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was awarded four Pushcart Prizes and one O. Henry Prize.
Born in The Bronx, New York City, Tuten is the son of a Sicilian mother and a French-Huguenot father and was raised in an impoverished but book-cultured family, in Pelham Parkway North.
Tuten received his undergraduate degree from the City College of New York. After studying pre-Columbian art history at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and travelling through South America, writing on Brazilian cinema, he earned a Ph.D. in 19th-century American literature from New York University, concentrating on Melville, Whitman, and James Fenimore Cooper, and taught literature and American cinema in France at the .[1]
Tuten spent 15 years heading the graduate program in creative writing at the City College of New York, which he co-founded. In that capacity, he championed the work of students Walter Mosley, Oscar Hijuelos, Philip Graham, Aurelie Sheehan, Salar Abdoh, Ernesto Quiñonez, and many others. He taught classes on experimental writing at The New School. He was on the board of advisors for Guernica Magazine and executive editor of Smyles & Fish. Tuten's short fiction has appeared in Granta, Conjunctions, Fence, Fiction, The New Review of Literature, Tri-Quarterly, BOMB, and Harper's Magazine. In 1973, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing and in 2001 was given the Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.[1]
Tuten has worked as an art and film critic in various venues such as the New York Times and Artforum and often incorporates allusions to these fields in his fiction as well. Tuten was a close friend of the artist Roy Lichtenstein and published several essays on his work, as well as catalogue essays for many other artists including John Baldessari, Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl, R. B. Kitaj, and David Salle.
Tuten currently resides in New York City's East Village.
Tuten's first novel, The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (1971),[2] a fictionalized account of Chairman Mao's rise to power, is highly experimental in nature. It contains Faulkneresque changes in narrative and lengthy fictional conversations with Mao that read like journalistic interviews. The story first appeared in 1969 in a 39-page condensed form in the magazine Artist Slain. The novel in its entirety was subsequently published by Citadel Press in 1971, and re-released in 2005 by New Directions. In 1988, The Philadelphia Inquirer noted that the book "was hailed as a modernist classic, with high praise from such differing sensibilities as Susan Sontag and John Updike."[3]
The cover of Mao features original artwork by Roy Lichtenstein. This is fitting for Tuten whom, in life as in his novels, has a keen interest in artistic criticism (particularly with regard to painting). Tuten himself was actually used as a model for the drawing, which Lichtenstein altered accordingly to resemble Mao.
His next novel, Tallien: A Brief Romance (1988),[4] is also about a historical figure, though one not nearly as well known as Mao. Jean Lambert Tallien was a high-ranking figure in the French Revolution, serving as the president of the Constitutional Convention and a member of the Committee of Public Safety. Like Mao, Tallien was a member of the common classes who rose to the upper crust of the revolutionary ranks.
Tuten tells the story of Tallien's courtship and marriage to Therese, a condemned member of the French aristocracy. When eyebrows are raised by Tallien's show of clemency, Tuten describes in minute organizational detail the sometimes-banal and sometimes-bloody bureaucratic struggle that ensues. The narrative is intercut with the author's account of his own father's life, demonstrating a literary mechanism similar to that used in The Adventures of Mao.
Reviewing the novel in The Palm Beach Post, Gary Schwam wrote: "Tuten tells this tale swiftly and vividly . . . This sharp, daring little novel is another report from the political and emotional gulag, another attempt to help us remember."[5]
Tintin in the New World (1993)[6] is perhaps Tuten's best known and most critically acclaimed work. The novel's unlikely protagonist is Tintin, the cartoon boy detective created by Belgian artist Georges Remi, better known as Hergé. Tuten transplants Tintin from his comic book confines into a fleshed out, realistic world with all its wicked, grave and abstruse trappings. Appreciation of the book is enhanced – but not needed – by an acquaintance with Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, whose characters appear in Tuten's novel.
The cover of this novel also features a drawing by Roy Lichtenstein, which was created expressly for the novel. Again, Lichtenstein makes use of the benday dot technique to depict Tintin and his dog Snowy in a near-miss with a would-be assassin's knife. Behind the seated Tintin hangs the painting Dance (I) by Henri Matisse, which in reality is displayed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Roy Lichtenstein's own rendering of Dance, sans Tintin, hangs in the same museum.
Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Edmund White called Tintin in the New World "queerly beautiful" and said that in the novel Tuten "shows that by tapping the energy of Hergé's archetypes he has, surprisingly, been able to make a statement more personal than autobiography."[7]
The book went through several print runs, both in the United States and the UK (in Britain, the novel was published by Marion Boyars Publishers, and later Minerva). The novel was also translated into French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, and Swedish. In 2005, it was re-released by Black Classics Press in the USA, with an introduction by Paul LaFarge. All editions of the book feature the Interior with Painting of Tintin jacket illustration created by Lichtenstein.
Like Mao and Tallien, Tuten's next novel, Van Gogh's Bad Café (1997),[8] offers an imagined glimpse into the psyche of a historical character, Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh. The book is also similar to Mao in that the time and place of action and the narrator are inconsistent throughout and change without warning. Van Gogh's Bad Café explores the themes of love and addiction.
In his review in The Los Angeles Times, Richard Eder wrote, "In 'Van Gogh's Bad Cafe,' his finest book, Tuten has brought to fruition what I think he was aiming at in the diverting but self-conscious 'Tintin.' His message about the end of art has become a work of art and almost too sad to bear."[9]
Tuten's most recent novel, The Green Hour (2002),[10] is in many ways a departure from the others. The setting is the present day, and the characters are not borrowed from history. Further, it lacks much of the impertinent humor and ethereal feel of his previous works. The story recounts the 30-year love affair between an academic and a spiritual vagabond.
Several of Frederic Tuten's novels and short stories feature a cat named Nicolino.
In 2007 Tuten was asked by literary website Smyles and Fish, along with lifelong friend Jerome Charyn, to write an essay about their former colleague and friend Donald Barthelme. The project evolved into a lengthy article, which offers a sort of collage of these three writers and the world of their influences. The work is divided into three parts - an introductory essay on the project by editor-in-chief Iris Smyles, Charyn's essay on Barthelme, and Tuten's piece "My Autobiography: Portable with Images", into which Tuten embedded illustrations by Max Ernst and quotes from Barthelme's works.[11]
In March 2019, Tuten published his memoir My Young Life with Simon & Schuster. Spanning 1944-1965, My Young Life follows Tuten from The Bronx to Greenwich Village, with side trips to Mexico City and Syracuse, as he chases his artistic and literary aspirations. It was reviewed in The New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and Booklist. It was selected as an Editor's Choice at BOMB Magazine.
In 2010, Tuten published Self Portraits: Fictions[12] a collection of interrelated short stories that create a portrait of Tuten's life, both real and imagined.
The author's 2022 short story collection The Bar at Twilight was praised in The New York Times Book Review: "Tuten's prose is always vital, often dazzling . . . "The Bar at Twilight" is neither normative nor predictable, and it bears the firm impress of the soul."[13]
In 2022, Tuten released On a Terrace in Tangier, a book of drawings, each with its own short story. In New York Magazine: Vulture, Jerry Saltz wrote,
"Frederic Tuten overflows with visionary scenes right out of a fecund and ungovernable imagination. Done in an awkward, assured, cartoonish hand with undertones of Arshile Gorky’s teeming amorphic graphic fields, this is pigment, shape, and scene as abstract language."
Tuten's first collection of short stories entitled Self Portraits: Fictions was published by W. W. Norton on 13 September 2010 and includes the following stories:
Tuten has contributed to the following books:
Tuten also co-wrote the 1981 cult movie Possession with its director, Andrzej Zulawski.[14]