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Alice B Toklas Is Missing
Jazz-age Paris was the center of the artistic and literary world, and the center of the center was Gertrude Stein' s salon, where the famous and aspiring creative talents gathered to gawk at Stein' s Picassos and vie for status. Young Midwesterner Ida Caine arrives in Paris with her husband Teddy, a would-be Hemingway who thinks he can adventure first and write later. When Teddy falls in with the Stein set, he brings Ida to the salon, where she is shunted into a corner with the wives of famous men. She burns with resentment, and wonders if she can ever develop into a real artist herself. A few days later, Gertrude Stein' s partner Alice B. Toklas vanishes. Stein calls upon Teddy to investigate. Soon after, he vanishes. Forced to seek out her missing husband, Ida follows his trail through a milieu including strange Surrealist rituals, Tarot card readings, and the catacombs beneath the city. She falls in with a young American poet, T.S. Eliot. An unlikely passion grows while they seek answers to the shocking disappearances.
288 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 28, 2023
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October 31, 2024This novel, set in 1920s Paris among the avant-garde of the day, is an entertaining read focusing on a young American painter, Ida Caine, whose unrealistic aspiring-writer husband has brought her to the Gertrude Stein/Alice B. Toklas home in his quest to insinuate himself into the bosom of the literary avant-garde. When Alice suddenly mysteriously disappears, followed by Ida's husband's somewhat less mysterious disappearance, Ida gets involved in figuring out what's going on, helped by Tom Eliot (better known to most of us as the poet T. S. Eliot).
However. While the novel is fun, I'm afraid I have some bones to pick with it. First of all, while we know it's fiction from the get-go, it's usual for historical fiction that includes famous historical characters or events to feature some sort of note from the author clarifying just what sort of liberties they've taken with the facts. This book lacks any such note, and it needs one far more than most historical fiction does, because it plays unusually loose with the facts. Readers (or moviegoers, for that matter) who don't know much about a given period or historical person tend to assume that most of what they're getting in a historical fiction is close to the facts. A fair number of people, for instance, who saw the movie Amadeus thought that Salieri actually poisoned Mozart, whereas there is no evidence that Salieri did any such thing (although there were rumors, which he denied).
As a reader who expects some general adherence to the factual setting in historical fiction, I noted that the novel took place prior to the stock market crash of October 1929, and after the founding of the Bureau of Surrealist Research in October 1924. The Bureau of Surrealist Research was pretty short-lived, opening four days before the publication of André Breton's first Manifesto of Surrealism (we're currently celebrating the centenary of surrealism and the International Society for the Study of Surrealism is meeting in Paris as I write this), only to close in early 1925. Now, given that the surrealists continued to be active and hold meetings long after abandoning the Bureau of Surrealist Research, I was willing to figure that the novel was simply set sometime between October 1924 and October 1929, rather than in that narrow window of October 1924 to early 1925. But I would have liked an author's note clarifying the intended year (or stating that the whole thing takes place in an alternate universe where familiar historical figures have entirely new biographical trajectories), because so many things in the novel strain against known chronology as well as any relationship to fact.
The author's use of the Stein-Toklas household and salon is a pretty good device for bringing together a lot of avant-gardists who would otherwise not have wanted anything to do with each other. We don't see some of the known regulars at the salon, while we do see people like Breton who are unlikely to have deigned to attend, but since it's easy to imagine almost any avant-gardist showing up at least once, an author note could clarify this bit of artistic license.
Since I'm a scholar of surrealism and surrealists play a fairly large role in the novel, I'll point out a few things that jumped out at me as needlessly wrong or confusing:
1) not too big of a deal, but Breton was not only unlikely to attend the salon, but didn't speak English--when he escaped to the US during World War II, he largely refused to learn the language. (And since Breton does crop up as a minor character, why not give his first wife Simone Kahn a role? She was active in early surrealism well before many other women were.)
2) Dora Maar gets a meaty role, but one that largely departs from her actual biography. Factually, she came to Paris from Argentina in 1926 and began to study art. Yes, her father was known for not making a fortune in architecture in Buenos Aires. However, the family was not Czech; Maar's father was Croatian and her mother was French. Yes, Dora Maar is known today for a relationship with Picasso, but she doesn't seem to have gotten to know him until 1935 (although I wouldn't be surprised if they attended some of the same events during the 20s). I don't think she was involved in surrealism until the 1930s.
3) To my surprise, Toyen also gets a role in the novel, but not one fitting biographically. Yes, Toyen did live in Paris from 1925 to 1928, but was not a surrealist at that time, instead being busy developing a two-person art movement called Artificialism with Jindřich Štyrský. The two did not become surrealists until 1934, when they were among the founders of the Prague surrealist group. Toyen moved back to Paris after World War II and was then close friends with Breton.
4) Minor point, but I kept expecting that "Marcel" at the Bureau of Surrealist Research would turn out to be Marcel Duchamp, which he certainly wasn't. Some other French name for this character would have been preferable.
5) Minor point, Leonor Fini moved to Paris in 1931 and began to associate with the surrealists during that decade. She might, I suppose, have taken a trip to Paris prior to that but probably wouldn't have known anyone there yet.
I guess I would just have expected that as surrealists play a fairly large role in the novel, more effort could have been made to use actual known information about surrealism and individual surrealists to flesh out this aspect of the novel. So much could have been done with the splits and disagreements that actually occurred within early surrealism! (The Breton group vs the Goll group; disagreements about whether surrealist visual art existed; the fight with Daumal's Le Grand Jeu group.)
I'll add that while I don't know an enormous amount about the Vorticist writer and artist Wyndham Lewis, I suspect his role in the novel departs significantly from what he would have done in real life.
So, to wrap up this dreadfully long review, let me reiterate that the novel is an enjoyable enough adventure that features a lot of famous people from the 1920s, but don't expect to learn about them or their avant-garde movements from it because the novel is largely unmoored from fact and has no note explaining what is historical fact (or even plausible) and what is random authorial fancy.
However. While the novel is fun, I'm afraid I have some bones to pick with it. First of all, while we know it's fiction from the get-go, it's usual for historical fiction that includes famous historical characters or events to feature some sort of note from the author clarifying just what sort of liberties they've taken with the facts. This book lacks any such note, and it needs one far more than most historical fiction does, because it plays unusually loose with the facts. Readers (or moviegoers, for that matter) who don't know much about a given period or historical person tend to assume that most of what they're getting in a historical fiction is close to the facts. A fair number of people, for instance, who saw the movie Amadeus thought that Salieri actually poisoned Mozart, whereas there is no evidence that Salieri did any such thing (although there were rumors, which he denied).
As a reader who expects some general adherence to the factual setting in historical fiction, I noted that the novel took place prior to the stock market crash of October 1929, and after the founding of the Bureau of Surrealist Research in October 1924. The Bureau of Surrealist Research was pretty short-lived, opening four days before the publication of André Breton's first Manifesto of Surrealism (we're currently celebrating the centenary of surrealism and the International Society for the Study of Surrealism is meeting in Paris as I write this), only to close in early 1925. Now, given that the surrealists continued to be active and hold meetings long after abandoning the Bureau of Surrealist Research, I was willing to figure that the novel was simply set sometime between October 1924 and October 1929, rather than in that narrow window of October 1924 to early 1925. But I would have liked an author's note clarifying the intended year (or stating that the whole thing takes place in an alternate universe where familiar historical figures have entirely new biographical trajectories), because so many things in the novel strain against known chronology as well as any relationship to fact.
The author's use of the Stein-Toklas household and salon is a pretty good device for bringing together a lot of avant-gardists who would otherwise not have wanted anything to do with each other. We don't see some of the known regulars at the salon, while we do see people like Breton who are unlikely to have deigned to attend, but since it's easy to imagine almost any avant-gardist showing up at least once, an author note could clarify this bit of artistic license.
Since I'm a scholar of surrealism and surrealists play a fairly large role in the novel, I'll point out a few things that jumped out at me as needlessly wrong or confusing:
1) not too big of a deal, but Breton was not only unlikely to attend the salon, but didn't speak English--when he escaped to the US during World War II, he largely refused to learn the language. (And since Breton does crop up as a minor character, why not give his first wife Simone Kahn a role? She was active in early surrealism well before many other women were.)
2) Dora Maar gets a meaty role, but one that largely departs from her actual biography. Factually, she came to Paris from Argentina in 1926 and began to study art. Yes, her father was known for not making a fortune in architecture in Buenos Aires. However, the family was not Czech; Maar's father was Croatian and her mother was French. Yes, Dora Maar is known today for a relationship with Picasso, but she doesn't seem to have gotten to know him until 1935 (although I wouldn't be surprised if they attended some of the same events during the 20s). I don't think she was involved in surrealism until the 1930s.
3) To my surprise, Toyen also gets a role in the novel, but not one fitting biographically. Yes, Toyen did live in Paris from 1925 to 1928, but was not a surrealist at that time, instead being busy developing a two-person art movement called Artificialism with Jindřich Štyrský. The two did not become surrealists until 1934, when they were among the founders of the Prague surrealist group. Toyen moved back to Paris after World War II and was then close friends with Breton.
4) Minor point, but I kept expecting that "Marcel" at the Bureau of Surrealist Research would turn out to be Marcel Duchamp, which he certainly wasn't. Some other French name for this character would have been preferable.
5) Minor point, Leonor Fini moved to Paris in 1931 and began to associate with the surrealists during that decade. She might, I suppose, have taken a trip to Paris prior to that but probably wouldn't have known anyone there yet.
I guess I would just have expected that as surrealists play a fairly large role in the novel, more effort could have been made to use actual known information about surrealism and individual surrealists to flesh out this aspect of the novel. So much could have been done with the splits and disagreements that actually occurred within early surrealism! (The Breton group vs the Goll group; disagreements about whether surrealist visual art existed; the fight with Daumal's Le Grand Jeu group.)
I'll add that while I don't know an enormous amount about the Vorticist writer and artist Wyndham Lewis, I suspect his role in the novel departs significantly from what he would have done in real life.
So, to wrap up this dreadfully long review, let me reiterate that the novel is an enjoyable enough adventure that features a lot of famous people from the 1920s, but don't expect to learn about them or their avant-garde movements from it because the novel is largely unmoored from fact and has no note explaining what is historical fact (or even plausible) and what is random authorial fancy.
December 5, 2023
So much fun! If you loved the Lost Generation era of Paris, you'll also love this inventive mystery and the way it wraps itself around this amazing era! LOVED!
December 18, 2023
A mystery set in 1920’s Paris, with all the expected characters: Stein, Toklas, Beech, Hemingway, Joyce and the list goes on.
A bit long at some points, but interesting.
A bit long at some points, but interesting.
March 3, 2024
This was an interesting story and well written. It took a few chapters to get into, but it was overall enjoyable. I was not familiar with many of the characters and the time period, so some of the references were lost on me. I like how the main character was from Lake Forest, Illinois.
January 28, 2024
You know when you discover a book that puts you in a great mood because the voice is so witty and fun and original that you try not to gobble it up all at once but you can't help yourself? — Alice B. Toklas Is Missing is that book.
Archambeau writes with the heart of a lover, and his immersion in the brilliant chaos of arts and politics that was Jazz-age Paris make this novel a joy to read. We follow the journey of Ida, a young Midwestern painter who strives to find her identity as a woman and an artist, and with her we meet a fascinating cast of characters on their way to becoming the most famous creative names of the era.
The plot launches with the shocking disappearance of Alice, Gertrude Stein's lover and hostess of Stein's arts salon. Ida's feckless husband Teddy claims to be a detective and promises Stein he will find Alice — but soon he vanishes as well, and Ida is left to pursue the deepening mystery with the help of American poet Tom Eliot. From the headquarters of the Surrealists to the bookstore Shakespeare & Company to the catacombs under Paris, they search for answers and help uncover a terrifying plot that goes far beyond the disappearance of one woman.
My advice from experience: buy an extra copy to loan your friends, otherwise they'll steal yours.
Archambeau writes with the heart of a lover, and his immersion in the brilliant chaos of arts and politics that was Jazz-age Paris make this novel a joy to read. We follow the journey of Ida, a young Midwestern painter who strives to find her identity as a woman and an artist, and with her we meet a fascinating cast of characters on their way to becoming the most famous creative names of the era.
The plot launches with the shocking disappearance of Alice, Gertrude Stein's lover and hostess of Stein's arts salon. Ida's feckless husband Teddy claims to be a detective and promises Stein he will find Alice — but soon he vanishes as well, and Ida is left to pursue the deepening mystery with the help of American poet Tom Eliot. From the headquarters of the Surrealists to the bookstore Shakespeare & Company to the catacombs under Paris, they search for answers and help uncover a terrifying plot that goes far beyond the disappearance of one woman.
My advice from experience: buy an extra copy to loan your friends, otherwise they'll steal yours.
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