art

The Original, by Nell Stevens

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“There was a painting my family set on fire. It burned to ashes, and then it came back.” This  irresistible opening blossoms into a prologue that for once works like the way a prologue should. It lures us on from sentence to sentence, introducing Grace, who at ten has been brought to live with her cold aunt and uncle in their bleak Oxfordshire mansion after her parents were shut up in a lunatic asylum.

Then the story proper starts in 1899 with a 25-year-old Grace and her aunt in Rome—the uncle has died—where her long-lost cousin Charles, presumed drowned at sea, has turned up.

But is it Charles? This man is enormous, unlike the slender Charles of 13 years earlier. He seems reluctant to claim them, although it is his letter that has brought them. Even his mother isn’t sure.

Although she eventually becomes convinced—or decides—that Charles is her son, other family members think he’s an imposter and push for a showdown in court. Like the Tichborne Claimant whose case fascinated Victorian Britain, Charles has no way to prove his identity beyond the details he so accurately remembers. Yet his behavior continues to be puzzling; he acts as though he doesn’t care whether he’s accepted or not.

It felt like someone amongst us was the mad one, but none of us knew who, and maybe it was all of us, each mad in a specific and complicated way. . . It felt as though we were all missing something.

Such a plot is always enthrallng, but it is really Grace’s story that pulls me in: her mad parents and only slightly less mad aunt and uncle, her dubious position in the household, and her secret gift.

Charles had been the only one to be kind to young Grace, teaching her to paint when he finds her copying his own work. However, her talent turns out to be for producing copies of paintings rather than creating her own originals.

Grace has a condition called face blindness where she cannot remember faces. She can only recognise people by smell or sound. Yet she can study a painting and remember every detail of it. As she gets older, she hopes that talent will be her ticket to independence. There is always a market for copies of famous paintings.

The discussions of pigment and glazes and details intrigued me. When she is asked to copy the famous Arnolfini Portrait,

I found myself beginning to write a kind of verbal map: toe of left clog, Naples yellow and white, five ascending dots of raw umber increasing in size from a quarter to a half an ant . . . Arnolfini’s robe: caput mortuum and black and, again, cerulean in repeating ripples, a succession of dark horizons tipped sideways.

What really lifted the book for me are the occasional aphoristic chapters, meditations on a color, like rose madder—“There are ways to navigate the world by colour alone . . .”—or a concept. “Some Truths About Copies” begins:

Everything in language is a copy of a real thing.

Every memory is a copy of the remembered events.

Everything done for the second time is a copy of when it was done for the first time, and an attempt to bring back something lost.

After all, are even we ourselves the same person we were at 17?

This story is rich in themes about authenticity, family, madness, belonging, class, and love. Stevens asks us to consider the intersection of these themes.

When we fall in love with a person, we start to copy them . . . When we fall in love with a person, we fall in love with the copy of them, inexpertly done, that we carry around with us whenever they aren’t there.

A suspenseful plot, vivid writing, a sympathetic main character, and much to think about: who could ask for anything more?

Have you read a novel recently that left you thinking about it long after you’d finished reading?

Metropolitan Stories, Christine Coulson

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This month’s pick seemed perfect for one of my book clubs. Advertised as a behind-the-scenes look at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York by someone who’d worked there for twenty-five years, it seemed designed to appeal to frequent visitors and fans like us. Indeed, we all enjoyed revisiting a favorite place. Most of our group praised it, some enthusiastically, some less so, but still finding it light-hearted fun.

My own reactions were mixed. I found some of the stories amusing, some poignant, and a couple  astonishing. However, I felt perturbed while reading the book, as though I were waiting for it to settle down and actually get started. Part of that feeling came from the declaration on the cover that the book is a novel when it is actually a collection of short stories with almost nothing to connect them except that they all take place at the Met. It is true that occasionally a character or item turns up in another story.

The styles of the stories are inconsistent, ranging from magical realism to satire to naturalism. The surreal aspect to some of the stories—artworks personified, instances of time travel—is well done. Still, the piecemeal nature of the stories left me longing for some kind of thematic through-line other than the museum itself. I wondered if the stories could have been arranged differently to provide better transitions between them. Again, though, almost everyone else in my book club enjoyed it immensely as is.

The other part of my feeling perturbed is a result of my expectations for the book. Not only did it not seem like a novel, there was little of the promised behind-the-scenes aspect. Yes, we visited the basement and the office of the director. We shared a neurotic curator’s worries about an upcoming exhibition and attended a fund-raising dinner. It was rather superficial, though. Once you take away the ghosts and talking artworks, it seemed no different from any other office workplace and many of the characters the sort of people you’d find in any business.

Maybe I shouldn’t have expected much of a theme or emotional depth from what’s clearly meant to be a light read. Yet a couple of the stories do achieve both with brilliant results, so I found myself wishing the author had done more. Even in the superficial stories, there are hints of themes that could be developed.

The Met itself raises some expectations. Despite their delight in the book, some members of my book club were disappointed that with all of the wonderful art at the Met, little was made of the emotional impact of the art itself. We expected more wonder perhaps. A rare exception is this description of one piece of sculpture..

This particular Adam was a favorite of scholars, but not of the visitors who crowded around other, more famous sculptures at the Met. His pure white form was the first life-sized nude of the Renaissance, idealized and simplified, with uninterrupted planes of muscle and a soft, dreamy grace. Supported by his right leg, his left foot lifted lightly off the ground, Adam was an art historian’s work of art: garden sculpture to most, but revolutionary to those who understood his historical force.

Of course, it’s the author’s book and her choice, and readers’ expectations are their problem, not the author’s. However, in this case, expectations could have been managed by not calling it a novel and not emphasizing behind-the-scenes revelations. Another way to manage expectations would be to order the stories to better lead the reader into the world of the museum. For example, I and one other member of my book club were offended by one of the stories, and since it was right up front, it colored my reading of the rest of the book. I might have had a different reaction to the book if that story had been later.

Perhaps some of these decisions came from the publishers. This author clearly had terrific writing skills; the couple of astonishing stories in this collection prove that. I’m saddened to find that she passed away earlier this year, a terrible loss to her friends and family as well as to the literary and art worlds. I wonder if this book might have been different if she’d had more time to work on it. I plan to read her other book and her shorter pieces which are available on her website.

What novel have you read that’s set in a museum?

The Art Thief, by Michael Finkel

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Why would a young man commit over 200 heists, stealing artworks and stuffing them into his attic bedroom? Finkel investigates the true story of Stéphane Breitwieser who stole nearly $2 billion worth of art—paintings, sculpture, tapestries, etc.—mostly from small museums that couldn’t afford a lot of security. Unlike other art thieves, he didn’t do it for the money. He claimed he did it to surround himself with beauty.

The first pieces he carefully displayed in his bedroom in the attic of his mother’s home in the French city of Mulhouse, but he couldn’t stop stealing and his loot began to pile up, as in any other hoarder’s lair. Breitwieser had no friends and didn’t work, but he did have a girlfriend who helped him pull off his heists.

Finkel’s earlier nonfiction book The Stranger in the Woods, about Chris Knight who spent 27 years living alone in a tent in the Maine woods, surprised me. Though curious to know a little more about Wright, I thought the story wouldn’t be substantial enough to fill a book—a feature article in a magazine, sure, but not a book. I was wrong. The depth of Finkel’s research, including in-person interviews with Knight and forays into the lives of the solitaries, kept me reading. I couldn’t help but catch his fascination with and curiosity about his subject.

Similarly here, Finkel keeps up the suspense to the last page. My book club all expressed their surprise at how spellbound they were by Finkel’s in-depth character study and by the artworks themselves.

We do have artists among us and all of us appreciate art. We’ve visited museums large and small, recognising sadly how scanty the security measures often are at the latter. How could they afford more? I remember many a small museum in Europe where, after paying a small fee at the door, I was free to wander about, no guards in the rooms and few other patrons.

We were also compelled by curiosity about Breitwieser himself. What kind of person would commit such selfish crimes? Not only did he endanger the art by taking it out of its controlled environment, but he hid it where only he and his girlfriend could enjoy it, denying the rest of us access. We were also interested in the two women who enabled him, the girlfriend who actively assisted him and his mother who pretended not to see what he was taking upstairs.

We called on the experts on law and psychology among us and speculated about his pathology. We all thought him such a strange person to act this way. But when we considered all the people these days who are greedily grabbing whatever attention, power, and money that they can, without the least regard for other people’s feelings, much less our lives and well-being—well, he’s not so strange after all. 

Also, while we deplored the thefts, we did feel a twinge of sympathy. A funny thing happened near the end of our discussion. One person admitted that every time they visit a museum she and her partner played a game of identifying which piece they wished they could take home with them. Several of us admitted to doing the same; I added that I usually tried to find a postcard of my chosen piece in the museum gift shop. We had a good laugh about how narrow the line is between our art appreciation and Breitwieser’s thefts. Yet it is a line none of us would ever consider crossing.

And therein lies the value of stories such as this. We’re not so different as we might think. Yet that difference is an important one.

What true crime story have you read that surprised you?

Still Life, by Sarah Winman

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Tuscany, August, 1944. Taking a walk after lunch, Evelyn Skinner sees a jeep and waves it down. As an art historian with decades of experience, she’s in Italy to help with the artworks from museums and churches that have been hidden in the hills during the war, identifying them and assessing the damage. She asks the young English soldier driving the jeep, Private Ulysses Temper, to help her contact the Allied Military Government.

Even in this brief scene, these two people capture the imagination, while Tuscany itself seizes the senses. Ulysses is on his way to pick up Captain Darnley, who has opened his eyes to glories of Italy and art and literature, and takes Evelyn along. Then we jump to London where we meet Ulysses’s wife Peg, Col who runs the bar where she sings, Cress who converses with a tree, the parrot Claude who lives in the bar and quotes Shakespeare, and others. From that point on the novel alternates between London and Florence.

I picked up this book wanting to spend some time in Italy in the middle of the twentieth century. The description are luscious, but the true beauty of the book comes from showing how the fragile threads we throw out to each can, over time, become a beloved community and a motley group of eccentrics can become a family.

There’s never any confusion with the wide cast of characters spread between the two cities. Each person vibrates with life, their adventures by turns dangerous, hilarious and poignant. We meet them as they gather in the sort of places we’ve started to call the commons: a pub, a café, a plaza. We follow them over the decades as they, and we, begin to see how these relationships that began so casually have become a web that can support them during the worst times.

Some people in my book club were bothered by the many unlikely coincidences, but most of us enjoyed the fairy tale quality of the story. We also appreciated the subtle use of symbols and the way different kinds of arts were folded into the story: music, paintings, sculpture, poetry, literature. The descriptions of places and people seduced me, and the dialogue is some of the best I’ve read.

However, the decision to present dialogue without quotation marks poses a problem. It’s a cool, modern thing to do, but this fiction is set in the past. Worse, I often couldn’t tell what was dialogue and what was narrative. Some stories manage to make this clear without the punctuation, but not this one. Most of the people in my book club had trouble getting into the book; they started and stopped, tempted to give up, or they had to reread parts near the beginning a few times before taking the plunge. They thought the lack of quotation marks played a part in their confusion.

Writers often struggle with beginnings and endings. In some of my reviews, you’ll find a complaint about an ending that seems too abrupt or that ties things up too neatly. Here, I found the opposite problem: the last section should have been cut. Unfortunately it leaves behind the rich cast of characters we’ve come to love in order to follow a single one, and introduces a slew of new characters here at the end of the book. The section is well-written, but unnecessary to the story. It felt like padding. I was disappointed, too, that it took some wonderfully evocative allusions from earlier in the book and ran them into the ground, just in case we didn’t get them. 

Yet even with these concerns, I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed a novel as much as this one.  Each time I picked it up, I felt as though I were sinking into a rich, delicious dream. What a wonderful, luxurious summer read!

What novel set in Tuscany have you enjoyed?

The Face on the Wall, by Jane Langton

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Professor Homer Kelly already has plenty on his plate, when his wife Mary presents the part-time sleuth with an important task: find out why her former student Pearl Small has disappeared. Worryingly, Pearl’s husband Fred is negotiating a deal to turn the land, a former pig farm which is in Pearl’s name, into a development of McMansions.

Meanwhile, the Kellys are helping Mary’s niece Annie as she uses the windfall from her suddenly success as a children’s book illustrator to build her dream home, constructing it as an extension to her current house and renting that out. Annie goes all out to make it everything she’s ever wanted, including a 35-foot blank wall where she begins to paint a mural of famous stories for children.

Enter the Gast family. Social climbers Roberta and Bob who rent Annie’s house have two children: ten-year-old Charlene, a self-centered swimming champion, and eight-year-old Eddy, who has Down’s syndrome. Eddy loves to visit Annie and watch her paint. When she gives him some materials to work with, she finds that he is a remarkably gifted artist.

All is not well, though. The Gast parents are embarrassed by Annnie’s artistic eccentricity, and covet her part of the house. Accidents plague the property. Worst of all, a face keeps appearing on Annie’s wall, no matter how many times she and Flimnap O’Dougherty, a strange handyman who showed up one day, paint over it.

And where is Pearl? We learn that she loves her inherited acres and has been turning them into a nature sanctuary, planting trees and flowers.

This thirteenth Homer Kelly mystery is a light-hearted story about art, hubris, and community action. What do we value? What do we owe each other?

There are a few incidents that strain the reader’s credulity, but they fit with the fairy-tale atmosphere of the story. I especially enjoyed mentions of various beloved children’s books, such as Wind in the Willows, and other favorites, such as Three Men in a Boat, and the pen-and-ink illustrations of Annie’s wall. There is also plenty of suspense that builds throughout the story, so that the pages fly by.

Jane Langton, who died in 2018, remains one of my favorite authors. Her children’s book Diamond in the Window has to have been the most influential book I read as a child. I still often think of the adventures in it. What I love about her adult books is the way she weaves a tale that whose charm and humor hold serious questions for those who care to look for them.

Have you read any of Jane Langton’s books?

The Blue Hour, by Paula Hawkins

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“How very odd it must be, living at the mercy of the tide.”

Eris is a tidal island off the coast of Scotland, meaning that it can only be accessed at low tide. It is a place of crashing seas, wild storms, and dark woods where mainlanders once buried their dead to keep wolves from disturbing them.

Once the home of the reclusive artist Vanessa Chapman, now—five years after her death—the island’s only inhabitant is Grace, her friend and companion. However, Vanessa’s art and papers were left, not to Grace, but to the Fairburn Foundation run by Vanessa’s lover-turned-enemy Douglas Lennox, who feuded with Grace for years, certain that she was holding back art and papers. He is now dead, shot in a hunting accident, and his son Sebastian in charge.

When one of Vanessa’s pieces, on loan to Tate Modern, is discovered to contain a human bone, Sebastian sends James Becker, curator of the Chapman collection to Eris to gather any papers that may shed light on the origin of the piece. Becker intends—unlike Sebastian’s family—to be conciliatory toward Grace, while she initially defends her isolation but gradually finds Becker eases her loneliness.

The shifting ground between the two of them captured and kept my attention.I found myself eager to get back to the book every time I set it down, wanting to explore the twists in the plot, rummage through the complicated relationships between the characters, and measure the reliability of each person. In a time when we are told so many lies, looking for the truth becomes a skill to be honed.

While two of the story’s voices are those of Grace, who loved her, and Becker who wrote his thesis on her work and is still obsessed with her, it is Vanessa—the third voice—who is at the heart of this story. A creative woman who fled domesticity and came to this wild island, her journal entries throughout the book bring out her voice and her rage to be free.

Through Vanessa’s own words, as well as those of Becker and others, her paintings became so vivid in my mind that I could almost swear I’ve seen them. I enjoyed imagining them and can easily say that it would have been worth reading the book solely for them.

The title also drew my attention, as I have always loved that mysterious hour before sunrise and after sunset. The image signaled to me that this would not be a breakneck thriller like Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train. Instead, it’s a slow burn of buried secrets, sinister suspicions, and mysterious deaths. It reminded me of Daphne du Maurier’s novels.

A glimpse at some of the reviews on Goodreads reveals a widespread dissatisfaction with the ending. I won’t give it away, but my interpretation of it is quite different from most people’s. I like ambiguity in fiction. I like being asked to invest some of my attention into working out the subtext of a story. Here, I felt quite certain of what was being said between the lines, and am surprised to find myself at odds with so many others. I’ll say no more, but once you’ve read the book, I’d be happy to share views on the ending.

 Can you recommend a mystery about a woman artist?

On Interpretation

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The first theater class I took was Oral Interpretation taught by the inimitable Esther Smith. If you ask anyone who was lucky enough to know Miss Smith, I bet they would tell you about the profound influence she had on their lives. She certainly did on mine.

The class was on how to work up a part based on a written script, i.e., how to interpret the text and deliver it in a way that conveyed your interpretation. One of the first things she said to us was about the three components of communication. I don’t remember the exact words she used, but basically the originator, the thing itself (book, painting, spoken words, etc.), and the person receiving it.

As a writer, I think about this often. I have control over the first two, but not the third. As a reader, how I understand a story or poem depends on me alone. Well, me and my cache of experiences, cultural contexts, predilections, etc.

I know what kind of experience I intend my story or poem to create in a reader, but they may get something entirely different from it.

What brought the idea of art as communication to mind was a recent review by Thomas Meaney in the London Review of Books, Vol. 45 No. 4, of an exhibit of George Grosz’s work at the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart.

It actually was an illustration that struck me: Grosz’s Tatlinesque Diagram. You can see a reproduction of it here.

The description by Paloma Alarcó on the website of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, says that the woman is a prostitute, based on her connection to another collage, and says that the collage simply represents contemporary people of various sorts. The title refers to Vladimir Tatlin, a Russian and Ukrainian artist and architect who famously designed The Monument to the Third International, also known as Tatlin’s Tower.

Indeed, in his review Meaney quotes this artist statement from Grosz’s autobiography: “My drawings had no purpose, they were just to show how ridiculous and grotesque the busy cocksure little ants were in the world surrounding me.” Meaney does not mention the Tatlinesque Diagram in the review but does describe “Grosz’s great theme – the domestic horror show of bourgeoisie.”

The collage says something quite different to me. The first thing I noticed was the walking man’s turned head. I thought it clever the way his larger head continued facing forward, while a tiny head inside is turned to fix on a photo of a naked woman. A woman in the foreground has just passed him. She, too, is naked, though wearing a hat, a ribbon around her neck and thigh-high stockings. She’s furtively glancing back at the man who just passed her. We see a grinning man approaching her, his head shown in outline like that of the larger head of the other man. We are left to imagine what his inner head is doing.

What struck me immediately was how accurately this collage depicts the way it feels, as a woman, in a public space where men are also looking at depictions of naked women. It might be a calendar on the wall or something on a computer screen or even a cartoon. No matter how fully clothed you are, you immediately feel naked.

It doesn’t matter if that’s what Grosz intended or if he just meant to depict the world around him. That’s what the collage conveys to me.

The writing life is one full of rejections. I try to remember how subjective the reader’s opinion is. We all bring different experiences and mindsets to what we read. The first piece of mine that won an award is a good example. In the same envelope with a letter saying the piece had won first prize (yay!) was the critique I had paid extra for—obviously written by someone else—saying it was one of the worst pieces they’d read, and that I should take an introduction to creative writing course.

All we can do as a writer, actor, or artists, is create as best we can and put it out there in the world. Sometimes a reader will actually see something in a story or poem that I didn’t intend but am delighted to have pointed out to me. Here are two quotes from authors, responding to a request from a student as to whether that ever happened to them:

Ralph Ellison: “Yes, readers often infer that there is symbolism in my work, which I do not intend. My reaction is sometimes annoyance. It is sometimes humorous. It is sometimes even pleasant, indicating that the reader’s mind has collaborated in a creative way with what I have written.”

Joseph Heller: “This happens often, and in every case there is good reason for the inference; in many cases, I have been able to learn something about my own book, for readers have seen much in the book that is there, although I was not aware of it being there.”

Has something you’ve created ever been understood by others in a way you didn’t intend?

Dear Suzanne, by Eve Rifkah

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Suzanne

I’ve read this slim volume several times and will probably continue to reread it. Rifkah alternates poems in the voice of artist Suzanne Valadon with prose sections by a present-day narrator, apparently Rifkah herself, that read like prose poems. Together they create a multi-faceted portrait of what it means to be an artist, a mother, wife, granddaughter, lover.

In summoning the spirit of Suzanne Valadon, Rifkah explores what it means to be a woman and an artist, unappreciated, known mostly for her work as a model for artists like Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Berthe Morisot. Rifkah imagines how Suzanne herself might have described her sacrifices for her husband André Utter and damaged son Maurice Utrillo V, both artists, Maurice being better-known than Suzanne until recently.

Grandmother and Grandson the last painting of Madeleine
age 79….her mind wrapped in superstitious wandering.
Her face turned away from Maurice
away from love shredded by madness
……….they suffer each other in ache
captured by daughter and mother
a trinity tied in paint *

This poem, which ends with Madeleine’s death, is followed by Rifkah’s description of her own mother’s death. By combining Suzanne’s voice with her own, intertwining their stories, generating resonances, Rifkah has created a stunning exploration of a multitude of family relationships.

Yet Rifkah also goes beyond this handful of lives to look at the freedom sought by an artist. Like Suzanne who did not change her name with marriage, Rifkah discards her father’s and husband’s name, “becoming me alone. We change our name to change the road we travel from birth.”

I appreciate the need to define your own life, free of society’s plan for you, having come of age during feminism’s second wave when all the old models for a woman’s life went out the window and we had to create our own.

Back then, I read biographies of women artists and writers, looking for ideas. Now I read them with appreciation for the difficulty of the task. Rifkah examines the deep urges that motivate an artist, whether of words or paint, even when you see your intensely imagined works outsold by others’ scenes that are taken home by tourists “to say they’d seen Paris.”

When my model leaves
fingers still tingle
……….brushes stay fast to my hand
like the girl in the story dancing in enchanted shoes
until feet cut off

Read this book to learn about Valadon. Read it to learn about being an artist. Read it for the pleasure of the lines and sentences.

Have you ever read a novel or biography in verse?

*Note that the dots are meant to indicate spaces.

The Woman Upstairs, by Claire Messud

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Anger.

On page one Messud gives us an angry woman. Is that allowed? Women are supposed to tamp down their rage so as not to upset others. And writers are told to work up to an intensity of emotion because if you start with high passion, where can you go from there?

Messud shows us in this brilliant novel. Nora Eldridge is the woman of the title: the quiet single woman who never keeps you awake with loud parties, whose help can be called on when needed, a woman for whom “Once your mother dies, nobody loves you best of all.” A second-grade teacher who regularly calls and visits her elderly father and irregularly sees her married lesbian friend, Nora’s early dreams of becoming a famous artist have withered to her seldom-used “studio” aka the second bedroom.

I was captivated immediately by Nora’s voice. Unlike Barbara Pym’s excellent women, Nora is open about her passions. She says her anger is “not because of all the chores and all the making nice and all the duty of being a woman—or rather, of being me—because maybe these are the burdens of being human.” What she’s angry about is the “hall of mirrors,” a society that is “lost in appearances” where every door that seems to lead to a more authentic life (though she wouldn’t say it that way) just leads to more mirrors.

It’s not just thwarted ambition; it’s the sense that she’s done everything right and ended up empty-handed. Influenced by her now-dead mother’s admonitions to be independent and not rely on an allowance from a husband, she postponed marriage and children to the point where it now seems too late. The idea that turning forty seems like the end to her may seem absurd, given our long and often late-blooming lives, but I know many women feel that way.

Meeting a professional artist, a successful woman on the verge of breaking out to international fame, sends Nora into unknown territory. Italian Serena Shahid has come to Cambridge, Massachusetts in this beginning of the 21st century with her husband, Lebanese Skandar, for his year-long fellowship at Harvard. When their son Reza appears in Nora’s classroom, Nora falls in love with him, and ultimately with both of his parents.

As they become friends, Serena asks Nora to share a studio with her, not only prompting Nora to take up her own art again, but also giving her the chance to be around a “real” artist at work.

I’ve heard often from writers and artists about their feelings of imposter syndrome and certainly felt it myself at the beginning of my career. If you’re not careful, the goal post of deciding you are a real writer or artist can keep moving: completing the novel, publication, achieving a certain sales number, bestseller, matching some perceived rival’s status. The only way off the hamster wheel is to accept in your heart of hearts that, as Julia Cameron says, since you create, you are an artist, whatever your medium.

Messud raises valid questions about what it means to be an artist. Does it mean, if you don’t want to simply work in obscurity, sucking up to the pretentious gatekeepers, those who schedule shows and write reviews and hang out with the “right” people? What must you sacrifice? What do you have to tell yourself?

I’m rarely angry, but I could relate to Nora. Plus the questions raised are ones I have long been interested in. As a memoirist and teacher of memoir-writing, ethical questions around creating abound. Even more, though, ever since the women’s movement of the 1970s I’ve been fascinated by the choices women make within the changing and unchanging constrictions of our society.

The writing is amazing. Nora’s voice just would not let me go as her relationship to her art, to the members of the Shahib family, to herself, all twist and turn, tangle and untangle. I’ve rarely encountered such an inhabited voice, one that leaves me feeling as though I truly know this woman. The passion in her voice is sculpted with a poet’s concision for maximum effect.

I always understood that the great dilemma of my mother’s life had been to glimpse freedom too late, at too high a price. She was of the generation for which the rules changed halfway, born into a world of pressed linens and three-course dinners and hairsprayed updos, in which women were educated and then deployed for domestic purposes — rather like using an elaborately embroidered tablecloth on which to serve messy children their breakfast.

Each phrase is so perfect: “deployed for domestic purposes!”

I especially relished the descriptions of the art: Serena’s Wonderland installation, Nora’s tiny boxes, each a room in a famous woman artist’s life. The ending felt a bit rushed, but satisfying. It left me speculating about what Nora would do next.

What novel have you read that cast a new light on your own experience?

Lisette’s List, by Susan Vreeland

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lisette

In 1937, young Lisette Roux and her husband André leave their beloved Paris and move to the south of France, to the small Provençal village of Roussillon to care for André’s grandfather Pascal.

Once an ochre miner, Pascal loved paintings whose pigments used his ochre. By exchanging his homemade frames for paintings by destitute artists, Pascal had acquired eight works of art. These paintings have grown in value as the fame of the artists grew, but their worth is beyond money to Pascal. He wants to be sure that André and Lisette understand their true worth and will protect them when he himself is gone.

The story is from Lisette’s point of view, first her misery at leaving Paris and the art world she is just beginning to move into, hoping for a job at a gallery, then her growing love for Pascal and Roussillon. She keeps track of her vows and promises to herself of what she will do in her lifetime.

All too soon, their life in Provence is overtaken by World War II. André hides the paintings before going off to fight, leaving Lisette to manage without his income. When the Germans occupy Roussillon, they are determined to find Pascal’s paintings.

In this final book from the author of books such as Girl in Hyacinth Blue and The Passion of Artemisia, we have the combination of historical fiction and a deep appreciation of art that we’ve come to expect from Vreeland. Along with Lisette, we are introduced to artists such as Pissaro, Cezanne and Picasso. The descriptions of the paintings and of Provence itself are luscious.

So why did I grow a little bored towards the middle of the story? Partly it was because these artists were not new to me. Partly it was because Lisette, the girl from Paris, seemed to accomplish new things without any trouble at all. Acquire and learn to care for a goat and chicken? No problem. Figure out how to make cheese and candies good enough to sell? Child’s play. She does face some challenges with the Germans and a man in town, it’s true. But I had a bigger problem with the book.

What we expect in a story is a protagonist with an overwhelming need or goal who faces obstacles to achieving what she’s set out to do. We expect there to be an external journey as she confronts these obstacles, as well as an internal journey as she learns more about herself and changes as a result of her inner and outer conflicts. We expect the stakes to be high for both.

The problem for me was that while Lisette certainly had an eventful outer journey, one with high stakes, she didn’t have much of an inner journey. She does have those vows and promises; she does want to be part of the art world, but it all seems rather vague. The stakes are low or non-existent for her inner journey. She doesn’t change by the end of the book. After eleven years, she’s still the same naïve young woman who came to Roussillon.

However, I’m glad I read the book, if only for the descriptions of life in Roussillon and of how the paintings affected Lisette and others. I’m grateful for the opportunity to think about the uses of art in our day-to-day lives, outside of museums and galleries.

What novel about art and artists have you enjoyed?