This is a magnificent book, perhaps a great one. Maybe not in terms of its total achievement, but certainly for what it has to say about the nature of artistic exploration, and absolutely for at least two of the astounding skills that Siri Hustvedt brings to her art as a novelist.
First of all, she is one of the most sensitive painters of love, desire, friendship, and human decency now writing. At the core of her story are two families living in New York. Leo Hertzberg, the narrator, is an art historian teaching at Columbia married to an English professor at Rutgers. Leo buys an enigmatic painting of a young woman and gets to know the artist, Bill Wechsler. Shortly after this, Bill and his wife Lucille (a rather arid poet) move in as neighbors, and both couple have sons, Matthew and Mark. A little later, however, Bill leaves Lucille and marries the model for Leo's painting, Violet Blom, a sociologist researching aspects of mental illness. The book is by no means as dry as these facts would suggest; although its first third contains very few events, it is alive with the emotional cross-currents of half a dozen people getting to know themselves and one another. Hustvedt has an extraordinary ability to write through the eyes and libido of a male character, yet with a woman's sensibility. The chapters in the middle of the book, after an unexpected tragedy puts an unendurable strain on their love, are as true and heartbreaking a portrayal of coming to terms with grief as anything I have ever read, exceeding even Joseph O'Neill's
NETHERLAND
and Anne Michaels'
THE WINTER VAULT
, both of which affected me in similar ways.
Secondly, Hustvedt, who has also published essays on art, writes more convincingly of art and artists than any fiction author I have ever read, period. She at least matches the achievement of Chaim Potok in
MY NAME IS ASHER LEV
in convincing the reader that her artist character is indeed a person of unique vision, and I think she exceeds the other author whom I have recently praised in this regard, (Sarah Hall in
HOW TO PAINT A DEAD MAN
) because she uses art as an integral means of telling the story. Over the course of his career, Bill Wechsler moves away from flat painting into constructions (rather like Joseph Cornell's boxes, but on a larger scale) that combine elements of painting, sculpture, found objects, and the written word, to explore themes both relevant to his personal life and with archetypal implications. Hustvedt is totally persuasive in tracing Wechsler's evolution, but she also uses her descriptions of art to take the novel into a psychological territory that cannot be contained by straight narrative and rational description. It links directly to a persistent subtheme of the novel, that of mental illness.
Bill Wechsler's last unfinished work was to be a video project called ICARUS. In myth, Icarus was the son of the artist and engineer Daedalus, who made wings with which he could escape with his son from the island of Crete. The title will have a more literal relevance in the novel, but it is also important as a symbol of what the artist does -- invent new ways of reaching places inaccessible by other means. With Wechsler, the process is clear. It is also something that Hustvedt does herself, turning to art, or descriptions of art, where narrative will no longer suffice -- but not just art. When the book opens, Leo Hertzberg has almost gone blind, and works now with his memories, objects that he can feel, and with words. Hustvedt does something similar in the latter part of the book, moving the story out of the quietly realistic into something more melodramatic, more fanciful, rather like what her husband Paul Auster does in works like
ORACLE NIGHT
. But I have to remember that the novel itself is not real life, but a set of artificial wings built to escape from some personal prison. One can only guess what this is for Hustvedt, but anyone who has been in contact with mental illness will recognize its power to elude rational handling. Hence the art, hence the melodrama. Is it a success? Not entirely, but as with Daedalus, the attempt is more magnificent than any failure.
Finally the time frame: Leo was born in Berlin in 1930; his narrative ends sometime in 2001. I find it touching that a book that is largely about living with loss should be bracketed by the Holocaust at one end and by 9/11 at the other. Though I am sure deliberate, these references are extremely subtle -- but then a quiet grace in the face of sorrows of such resonance remains the distinguishing feature of this entire book.
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