MacArthur Park

A wonderful and revealing book about the bond between two strong American women involved in a lifelong triangle and the different, sometimes conflicting, paths they take across time--and across the country--toward intimacy and real self-knowledge. Eccentric, readable, and beautifully crafted, this novel shows us what it means to be an artist and what it means to love other people, and a stream of bracing fun and wit burbles behind the book's powerful, contemporary American story. Freeman, as always, captures nuance and character in swift, evocative strokes, and never flinches from taking a hard look at what the dark future holds and how we are to face it. --Amy Wilentz, author of The Rainy Season Like Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner's classic novel of life-long friendship in all its richness and complexity, Judith Freeman's MacArthur Park invites us into the deepest, truest, most contradictory chambers of the intimate, difficult, and surprising bonds between three beautifully drawn characters across the decades. You might not always like these three, but you will love them, as I do--for who they once were, who they have become, and who they may yet still be.--John Burnham Schwartz, author of The Red Daughter and The Commoner Judith Freeman's gift as a writer is weaving faces and places into the vivid landscapes she knows so well. This time she takes us from L.A's MacArthur Park to Utah through the rural west, while offering a glimpse of the feminist art world in a moving and complex story about childhood best friends, and the lover who later comes between them. MacArthur Park is a poetic and mysteriously wondrous tale of marriage and friendship. --Tina Barney, photographer Judith Freeman's luminously written tale of two friends on a journey toward self-resolution shines with grace, wisdom, and compassion. I was so entranced by the inner and outer worlds Freeman creates, I didn't want this heart-opening book to end.--Barbara Feldon, actress