A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity: A Novel

A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity: A Novel

The bestselling author of How to Make an American Quilt transports us to San Francisco in the early 1980s, a magical, fog-shrouded city suffused—as are many of its denizens—with possibility and restless energy. In A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity , Whitney Otto’s charac-ters congregate night after night at a North Beach bar called the Youki Singe Tea Room, their lives conjoined by the bonds of friendship and shared experience. At the Youki Singe, the stories of these young people’s lives—their parties, their eccentric living situations, their passions for books and art and one another—are recorded in one patron’s “pillow book,” her version of the intimate journals of the courtesans of Edo Japan. Meanwhile, though, the careless joys of the drifting life are giving way to a desire to find something more substantial, a need to belong to something or someone. The title A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity is taken from a series of woodblock prints by the eighteenth-century artist Utamaro, a master at depicting Japan’s legendary Floating World, where, it is said, the patrons of the great pleasure quarters—and their escorts—devoted them-selves to the pursuit of music, sex, food, poetry, theater, and fashion. Now, two hundred years later and an ocean away, the young men and women of Otto’s San Francisco find themselves in their own version of a Floating World. Illustrated with more than two dozen beautifully reproduced woodblock prints, A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity conjures an atmosphere both dreamy and contemporary. Whitney Otto engages the senses as well as the mind while exploring the intricacies, the trouble, and the rapture of human connection. Set in San Francisco in the 1980s, A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity is a novel of late youth--the final indulgences and excesses of a group of friends before paths are chosen, before character is set. Whitney Otto ( How to Make an American Quilt ) takes as her inspiration the floating world depicted in Japanese prints of the Edo period. Her characters, most of them denizens of the Youki Singe Tea Room in North Beach, live in the moment. They are unambitious, minimally employed, well-educated, and self-indulgent. Dreamers of various kinds, the women (who have artful names like Jelly, Coco, Gracie, and Theo) are passionate about their friendships, their parties, and their appearance. The narrative is as fluid as the characters, sometimes delivering a perfectly formed short story about a minor figure, and other times tracing back to explain a pivotal high school incident. Readers who give themselves over to this flowing story line, and to the shifting array of characters, will find this a rewarding and oddly moving novel. A Collection of Beauties perfectly evokes a particular mood of watchfulness, as its characters wait for their world to form around them. --Regina Marler Otto's title recalls a set of 18th-century Japanese woodblocks showing the lovely ladies of Edo, Japan, at the height of the country's most sensual period. It also refers to her scruffy collection of characters, who gather at the Youki Singe Tea Room in North Beach as they try to avoid the obvious: they should be doing something better with their lives. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. Otto made a splash with How to Make an American Quilt (1990), and here she presents another collection of related tales, this time featuring a recurring cast of educated, underemployed late-twenty- and early-thirtysomethings living in San Francisco in the 1980s. The title refers to a particular series of eighteenth-century Japanese prints known as ukiyo-e , or "floating world," for their depiction of subjects from transient everyday life. Chapter names are drawn from nicely reproduced and captioned examples of ukiyo-e. Using this art as a unifying theme is apt, for the characters--Jelly, Micha, Theo, Gracie, and the rest--drift along in their own floating world, "a time and place of careless pleasure." They often meet at the Youki Singe Tea Room, and bookending the chapters is Elodie, who spends much of her time at the tearoom working on her version of a pillow book, a collection of observations written in medieval Japan by ladies of the imperial court. Otto's concept is intriguing, and, true to the Japanese aesthetic, she floods her pages with exquisite detail. But the characters in her floating world also float through the reader's mind, leaving no lasting impression. Mary Ellen Quinn Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Advance praise for A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity “With supreme delicacy and an imaginative combination of the arts, Whitney Otto has produced a truly original addition to our American literature.”—Carolyn See, author of The Handyman “A visually beautiful book, original and intriguing. Otto masterfully explor