These Lowly Objects

These Lowly Objects traces the mythic rise and mysterious disappearance of Jules Lalande—painter, provocateur, shapeshifter, and self-invented legend whose life entangles him with the early twentieth century’s brightest and most volatile avant-garde figures. From his childhood in Lucerne through the salons, studios, and trenches of Europe, Jules refuses to remain any one person for long. He is a miracle child, a silent prodigy, a survivor of war, a performer who almost stages his own suicide for a crowd hungry for spectacle, and later a fugitive slipping across borders with a pouch of disguises. The novel revels in this mercurial figure: a man who “was at least thirty men and a few women, too,” driven by art, desire, and the perilous pull of reinvention.

Across decades and continents, the search for Jules becomes its own intoxicating art. Enter Titus Pidgeon, a persnickety but keen London Times reporter whose pursuit of the elusive Lalande draws him through prewar Paris, surrealist enclaves, and the recollections of everyone Jules has altered—or haunted. Alongside Titus stands the fierce and magnetic Isobel Wilde, Jules’s wife, muse, and occasional adversary, whose artistic brilliance casts a steady, unsettling light across the story. Together, these voices shape the portrait of a man who unmoors the world around him—a historical roman à clef alive with intrigue, ghosts, cabarets, betrayal, and the crackling birth of modernism. These Lowly Objects asks what remains after a life devoted to invention and what truths can be recovered from the wreckage of a beautiful, impossible man.

Praise for
THESE LOWLY OBJECTS

These Lowly Objects is a hilarious historical romp, whose rich mystery often progresses by destabilizing what the reader thinks they know, always promising the real truth must surely be just a few pages farther in. McGowan’s gorgeous prose captivates throughout, creating a richly imagined caper full of honest oddities and clever games, surprising disguises and brilliant deceptions. —Matt Bell, author of Appleseed and Refuse to Be Done

Cate McGowan’s whipsmart storytelling sings like poetry (as always), and her indomitable protagonist, Jules Lalande, kicks irreverence up to another level. It takes courage for an artist to be different, for an artist to be an artist. In These Lowly Objects, famous painters, authors, and truth-seekers rub elbows, and the masters are as flawed as the mere mortals. McGowan’s writing is extraordinary, and this is a stunning work of fiction.—Brad Watson, author of Miss Jane and The Heaven of Mercury

Cate McGowan’s novel, These Lowly Objects, is a vertiginous, absinthe dream, a kaleidoscope of alchemized selves, reminiscent of Hawkes’s The Lime Twig, Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, or Adler’s Speedboat—a steep precipice, a fierce cataract of language like nothing I’ve read, a gorgeous outwitting of time, a slipping of the sleeve of self/selves through a high wire act of literary imagination. Brava!—Melissa Pritchard, author of Flight of the Wild Swan, Palmerino, and A Solemn Pleasure

These Lowly Objects is history wrapped in lyricism glimpsed through stained glass within a hall of mirrors. Mysterious, surreal, and deeply satisfying, this novel is the page-turner you’ve been seeking, and Cate McGowan is the writer you’ve been waiting for.—David James Poissant, author of Lake Life and The Heaven of Animals

Lyrical, stunning, and deeply strange, Cate McGowan’s novel concerns a shape-shifting protagonist, Jules Lalande. Lalande disappeared years ago: various people—his estranged wife Isobel Wright, journalist Titus Pidgeon, and the people Pidgeon interviews, including historical figures like Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp—chase his scent. McGowan’s luminous novel tracks their efforts to conjure this enigmatic poet-painter-performance artist-thief-con man-duke-trauma victim-killer-healer. Twisty and original, These Lowly Objects is fundamentally about self-hood, its precariousness and perishability, and its surprising capacity for resurrection.—Kim Magowan, author of The Light Source and Undoing