It is peculiar perhaps to name a book for a character who is no longer present. The new PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel by Kate Christensen begins with a New York Times obituary. Oscar Feldman, The Great Man of the title, has just passed away, and while the book is apparently about the race for two biographers to complete their studies of the life and relationships of the deceased artist, this merely serves as a pretext to explore the vibrantly fascinating WOMEN who shared his life - his mistress, his wife, and his sister.

The successive segments are organized around interviews with each of the women - Teddy St. Clair, Abigail Feldman, and Maxine Feldman; however, these are just the context in which larger developments take place. Both through their introspection and their verbalized self-revelation, the women contemplate their relationships with Oscar and with each other. While not exactly grieving the loss of this major figure in their lives, his absence and the presence of these two both intrusive and curious biographers provoke them to reexamine who he was and who they are. As a result, they undergo self-examinations and reflections on their emotional engagements not only with him, but also with their female friends, partners, and family members, as well as these biographers.

The genius of the book, and in Ms. Christensen's writing style, and really the reason it seems for the award, is that each interaction with another major and minor characters, reveals a different aspect of the personality of the principal people. Surprise, these characters really do behave differently, depending on who they are with. Often they even surprise themselves! This effect is what lures the reader on. Initially, the women are all reticent towards the interviewing and interloping biographers, Henry and Ralph, and they express this is varied ways. Variously, deliberately or unconsciously, they display genuine or false welcoming behavior, agreeing to the interviews and conversations, and then participating with (again variously, even in the course of one conversation) complicity, confrontation, outright hostility, interrogating them in return. The interviewers' skill in handling the situation or lack of comprehension of what the women are doing determines the course of how they interpret the man.

So conceptually, the novel is deftly constructed and unusual in its style. Cleverly offering to reveal the Oscar Feldman's character, the novel is really only tangentially descriptive of him, elaborating in his absence who he was by the relationships that formed around him, rather than with him, . . . and that continue to grow, change, and develop now that he is gone. Try this newly acclaimed novel, as it is absolutely worthy of attention and the award.
The Great Man (Doubleday, 0385518455, $23.95)

- Andrew