The Age of Light

Starred review from October 22, 2018
Scharer’s stellar debut chronicles the tumultuous working and romantic relationships of photographer Man Ray and model-turned-photographer Lee Miller in early 1930s Paris. As as an older woman living on a farm in East Sussex, Lee contemplates an assignment to write about her time with Man. Scharer intersperses her memories of that era with the grim but satisfying later years of being a WWII photographer. The years during and after the fall of Hitler led to her most important work, but also to a drinking problem. These scenes are juxtaposed against her hope-and-love-filled initial years in Paris, where she meets the older Man at a party and later convinces him to take her on as an apprentice. Man nurtures her talent as a photographer but also proves himself possessive and controlling, both as a lover and as a mentor. It becomes clear that he and his circle of famous artists ultimately don’t take women’s work seriously, prompting Lee to betray him. When Man guts her by submitting her photography under his name for a prize, she exacts revenge via another project he wanted to take from her and brings matters to a head. Scharer’s brilliant portrayal of the complicated couple features a page-turning story and thrillingly depicts the artistic process.

November 15, 2018
A portrait of Lee Miller, the American cover girl and war photographer whose wild spirit captivated Picasso, Cocteau, and other eminences in 1930s Paris.Readers meet Lee in 1966, at the farm where she retreated with her British husband, a painter and curator, after documenting Nazi atrocities and the liberation of Europe as Vogue's war correspondent. She's forgotten the old boxes of photoprints she heaved up to the attic--including the one of her posing in Hitler's bathtub--and now writes mainly about food, brilliantly, though she drinks so heavily she misses deadlines. She's expecting to get sacked when her editor suggests taking a pause to write about her years in Paris as Man Ray's student and about some of his photos from that time. "The woman's touch....A story only you can tell." Cornered, Lee accepts--with one caveat: not his photos, hers. And what a story! It starts with Lee's first glimpse of Ray at a surrealist orgy she's dragged to by new acquaintances. After modeling couture for some of the best photographers in New York, she's just 22 and come to the Left Bank to make art. The only male in the room wearing a suit, Ray rescues her from their leering host and invites her to drop by his studio. That Ray, who is close to 50, doesn't come on to her means the world given Lee's history--raped by a family friend as a young child and ogled by powerful men ever since. She's not interested in posing, as he assumes, but makes herself indispensable by keeping him on schedule and showing his posh clients how to relax in front of a camera--a skill she acquired while posing au naturel for her weird-but-loving father, an amateur shutterbug. She's mildly obsessed by Ray's girlfriend, Kiki, the local chanteuse and artist's model whom Ray has photographed nude many times. But Kiki is history the day Ray shows Lee how to print off her first photograph--the nape of a woman's neck, her fingers scratching the skin--taken with the Rolleiflex camera he helped her buy. Later, as she thinks back on what they gave and took from each other, she'll wonder which of them was more destroyed. Scharer sets her viewfinder selectively, focusing on her heroine's insecurities as much as her accomplishments as an artist; her hunger to be more than "a neck to hold pearls, a slim waist to show off a belt" is contrasted with her habit of solving problems by simply leaving. The price for Lee is steep, but it makes for irresistible reading.Sexy and moving.

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Starred review from November 1, 2018
The remarkable life story of photographer Lee Miller?a successful Vogue model in New York who decided she would rather take a picture than be one and moved to Paris in 1929 to learn what life looked like from behind the lens?has been recounted in Carolyn Burke's superb biography, Lee Miller (2005), but Scharer's intoxicating first novel adds depth and shade to the picture, bringing a stunning chiaroscuro effect to the saga of a woman transforming herself into an artist. Miller has often appeared as a supporting character in the story of surrealist artist Man Ray, who was her lover in Paris and who became her mentor as a photographer, but Scharer puts Miller front and center, with the result being a deeper, more compelling story. Without diminishing what was a supremely passionate love affair, the novel details how Man Ray sought to appropriate as his own the innovative photographic techniques that the couple had developed together, prompted by a discovery that was Miller's alone, and showing how, in the end, it was Miller who outgrew her lover and realized that she needed to explore a larger world outside his shadow, which she did as a photojournalist during WWII (Miller's photographs of the death camps were among the first to reach American eyes). Scharer effectively jumps back and forth in time, moving from bohemian Paris to the battlefields of Europe to Miller's declining years in England, and she is always alert to the interplay of passion, intelligence, exhilaration, bitterness, and melancholy that fueled this unique woman to create a life of her own. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The object of an intense bidding war that resulted in a million-dollar deal, Scharer's first novel ?more than lives up to its prepublication hype.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

September 15, 2018

A debut novelist who has already collected numerous honors, e.g., the Emerging Artist Award in Literature from the St. Botolph Club Foundation, Scharer proves herself with a particularly felicitous choice of subject: she portrays the fraught relationship between Vogue model-turned-photographer Lee Miller and artist Man Ray, with 1930s Paris and World War II as backdrop. In particular, she shows Miller rebelling against her role as muse and going her own way, provoking her mentor's jealous rage. With a 150,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

DEBUT During a midlife malaise, Vogue writer Lee Miller is given an assignment to pen her previous life with surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray. So begins the this novel's narrative, painting a vivid portrait of bohemian Paris from the 1930s to 1940s. Lee, a former Vogue model, moves to Paris to reinvent herself as a photographer. There she meets Man Ray, who becomes her mentor, tutor, and lover. She becomes his muse. The troubled and intense relationship between the two is described among meetings with other famous artists of the time; in opium dens and smoky bars catering to the artistic and the elite. Lee also reflects on her time as a photojournalist documenting the atrocities of World War II. Her journey is of a woman overcoming the shadows of the men in her life and reclaiming her own story. VERDICT Scharer's debut is both engrossing and cinematic, a must for readers who enjoy a fictional peek into the lives of real-life artists. Recommend to admirers of Harriet Scott Chessman's Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper. [See Prepub Alert, 8/20/18.]--Nanci Milone Hill, M.G. Parker Memorial Lib., Dracut, MA