Shadow-Box

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.)