The Face of a Naked Lady
An Omaha Family Mystery
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A son uncovers the remarkable secret life of his midwestern father—and his Nebraska city—in this “beguiling [and] deeply unusual” memoir (The Boston Sunday Globe).
Nick Rips’s son had always known him as a conservative midwesterner, dedicated, affable, bland to the point of invisibility. Upon his father’s death, however, Michael Rips returned to his Omaha family home to discover a hidden portfolio of paintings—all done by his father, all of a naked black woman.
His solid Republican father, Michael would eventually discover, had an interesting past and another side to his personality. Raised in one of Omaha’s most famous brothels, Nick had insisted on hiring a collection of social misfits to work in his eyeglass factory—and had once showed up in his son’s high school principal’s office in pajamas.
As Michael searches for the woman in the paintings, he meets, among others, an African American detective who swears by the clairvoyant powers of a Mind Machine, a homeless man with five million dollars in the bank, an underwear auctioneer, and a flying trapeze artist on her last sublime ride. Ultimately, in his investigations through his Nebraska hometown, he will discover the mysterious woman—as well as a father he never knew, and a profound sense that all around us the miraculous permeates the everyday.
“Writing with similar pain and urgency as Nick Flynn in Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and August Kleinzahler in Cutty, One Rock, Rips’ terse, flinty syntax perfectly embodies the hard-boiled nature of this nearly surreal true-life tale.” —Booklist
“An amazing, beautiful book—a study of a certain family in a certain place at a certain time that gives us, in stunning shorthand, the reality of America.” —Joan Didion, author of The White Album
“At once a lyrical family portrait, a philosophical inquiry, a bittersweet evocation of a lost time and place, and an enthralling domestic mystery.” —Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief
“Quirky, funny, moving, and immensely readable . . . a brilliantly observed story about place, family, and race in America.” —Randall Kennedy
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Some time after his father died, Rips traveled with his wife to hometown Omaha to sort through the estate. In the basement of the family manse they found a hidden portfolio of paintings by his father, all featuring a naked black woman. Rips's search to identify this woman, and thereby to understand better his enigmatic father, a reticent, wealthy Republican, forms the frame of this finely wrought book, remarkable not only for its vivid storytelling and magical realist approach a rarity in nonfiction but for its intelligent and musical meshing of memoir and philosophy. The latter comes via the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas, a student of both Husserl and Heidegger and a concentration camp internee, who taught that we can know only mystery, but can learn even so. The memoir ambles along the time line of Rips's life, rooted in blood (his grandparents owned a brothel where his father was raised and to which Rips devotes many words) and in land (an Omaha that's a garden of weirdness), twisting up through his father's life and his own with a shower of remarkable stories (the dead man who fell through a ceiling; the optical worker with a prosthetic penis attached to his boot; the millionaire who lives on the street), intertwining with the present and Rips's pursuit of the woman in the paintings. Rips, bemused and appreciative, writes beautiful prose; his book's structure, too, is artful, a steadily surprising phantasmagorical bridge from mystery to mystery. This is a book readers won't forget.
