Craig Plumber, once a world renowned sculptor known as DeBris, is unable to enter his studio without being seized by debilitating fits of anger and agitation. Nina Brown, once a serious student known to family and friends as Fancy, woke up one day unable to bear the sound of her given name being spoken. Craig, now running a remodeling business in NYC, is undone by dark resonances from a buried past when, Nina, his client’s alluring, yet callow nanny, arrives from Seattle fresh out of rehab. Each suffering a deep, barely perceived identity crisis caused by vastly divergent traumas, the pair, in a twist of bisecting fates, seeks refuge in a shapeshifting relationship that proves to be as star-crossed as it is ultimately liberating.
Set in 1994 New York, Passing Fancy transports the reader into the mind of an artist—not always the most glamorous milieu—but the ideal setting for passion, obsession, self-delusion, and ultimately a kind of madness. An extraordinarily compelling story of an artist breaking through his creative blocks, the plot is driven by his need to atone for his hand in the drug-related death of his first wife, as well as a need to save his young lover and muse from a similar fate.
As the source of his renewed inspiration, the artist’s relationship with his mercurial muse becomes an obsession that, in the end, sends the pair on a quixotic—sometimes hallucinatory—road trip from Brooklyn to Seattle, and straight into a confrontation with his lover’s troubled past.
In this intimate portrait of the inner workings of an artist’s mind, real ideas and concepts reveal themselves in the heat of the creative process. Along the way, some of the NY Art Scene’s most sacred cows are flayed—precious totems are discarded, rigid taboos are transgressed—leaving the accepted cannon equitably desecrated and belied.
Don Quixote as an artist possessed, Sancho Panza a young girl fresh out of rehab; the knight errant and squire-consort as passionate lovers with a shared anguish, off on a journey to recapture their will to endure, their sense of identity—and their very sanity. Add to this the snappy dialogue of Raymond Chandler, and you have the Post-Postmodern Picaresque: Passing Fancy.
