In 1955, Jenny Van Horne was a 21-year-old, naive Bennington College graduate on her own for the first time in New York City when she met 46-year-old Clement Greenberg who, she is told, is the most famous, the most important, art critic in the world and soon finds herself swept into his world and the heady company of Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, David Smith, Helen Frankenthaler, among others. Seven months later, as a new bride, Jenny and Clem spend the summer in East Hampton near Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, and she feels even more keenly like an interloper in the inner...