Various Antidotes

by Joanna Scott

Before she turned thirty, Joanna Scott published three wholly original and provocative novels that offered discerning readers sure proof of the arrival of a major new voice in American fiction. Her most recent work, Arrogance, which employed the short life of expressionist painter Egon Schiele as the inspiration for an exploration of art, genius, madness, and society in fin de siecle Vienna, was a finalist for the 1991 PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Now, in her first collection of short stories, Various Antidotes, Scott culls from the annals of science and medicine real and imaginary figures whose peculiar obsessions she transmutes with effortless alchemy into the stuff of art. In one story she writes of van Leeuwenhoek, the mad lens-grinder of Delft, whose early microscope designs allowed him to see life in a drop of water and for whom "there was hardly a difference between discovering life and