A Richer Dust - 9781579621599

When Doll, a British painter just out of art school at Slade, arrives in New Mexico in 1925, she is certain only of her faith in the man who invited her: social philosopher Abe Bronstein, who has left Britain to found a model society in Taos. Doll has renounced her own aristocratic roots to join the high desert household of Abe and his wife Vera (a scandalous German divorcée). Doll's narration of events moves backward to her childhood in Victorian London, and forward to her solitary life in 1963 Taos—solitary until she meets the much younger Akbar ("He doesn't know how much younger and I don't plan to tell him"). As the community around Abe—which loosely incorporates East Coast heiress Janie; her Native American husband, Junior; local Indians from the reservation; and a war-traumatized Chicago poet and his wife—unravels, Doll's affair with Akbar, the most fulfilling of her life, intensifies, but it puts her in small-town conflict with Akbar's mother, protective of her sweetly ne'erdo- well son. Inspired by events in the life of the British painter Dorothy Brett, who ventured to Taos with D.H. Lawrence and his wife in the years after World War I (and, unlike the Lawrences, stayed to brave it out), A Richer Dust finds in Doll's life the convulsive shift from the Victorian to the Modern, as aesthetics and sexuality found explosive new forms. It is the story of a woman who remains open to life despite discouragement and disappointments, and whose self-discovery—of her art, her body, and her mind—is as unceasing as it is unaffected. The Taos landscape, through Doll's eyes (and through the rest of her keen senses, except for her damaged hearing), is vivid and breathtaking, and serves as a magnificent canvas for sketching the arc of her life.