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Human Flaws Exposed: Dazzle Patterns

12 Monday Nov 2018

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Review: Dazzle Patterns, by Allison Watt
Freehand, 2018. 339 pp. $22

Clare Holmes works in a glassworks in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1917, a port city that buzzes with wartime traffic. Living in the big town instead of on her parents’ farm has provoked a constant, simmering conflict with Clare’s controlling mother, Ada. But Clare has plans that Ada would never dream of. The young woman is saving up for her passage to France so that she can become a Red Cross nurse and be near her soldier fiancé, Leo.

However, when a ship blows up in the harbor, the blast destroys the glassworks and a swath of town, leaving many dead. The consequences for Clare are severe and cascading. Not only does she lose an eye, which means Ada grabs her and brings her home; Clare worries that Leo won’t want her anymore; and, worse, the post-traumatic stresses sap her desire to live. Her friends hold out hope that she’ll be able to return to the glassworks, but her job there involved checking the product for flaws, and the boss isn’t the only one who doubts she can manage that with only one eye. It’s a nice twist, the flaw-checker who feels — and is — damaged herself. And she becomes so aware of her imperfection that she can hardly get out of bed, let alone function.

But Clare is nothing if not independent-minded, and Watt has put her protagonist’s inner life on vivid display. Overcoming her disability literally means Clare has to develop another way to see the world in perspective; and when you read that she takes up drawing, the metaphor gains breadth. But her adaptation of course involves how she sees herself, and this is my favorite aspect of Dazzle Patterns. Where once Clare defined the future as being Leo’s wife, or, more immediately, staying out of Ada’s clutches and becoming a nurse, she now takes a larger view. It’s as if Clare’s loss and necessary compensation for it have let her grow in unforeseeable ways, to extend the metaphor even further.

Watt’s at her best when the narrative stays in Halifax. She portrays the home front and all its fears and prejudices with a sure hand, as well as the boarding house Clare lives in, the glassworks, and the horrific aftermath of the explosion. Here’s the destruction recounted through the eyes of Fred, a glassblower whom Clare later befriends:

Walking back to his rooming house Fred saw houses fallen in upon themselves, charred like abandoned bonfires, or burnt completely away, only the chimneys flooded with black puddles of ash and snow. Standing houses stared blank-eyed, all their windows gone. Telephone poles tilted. On the street, a breadbox, a school bag, a woman’s evening shoe, black patent with a pointed toe and a velvet bow. At the corner of Agricola and West Street, Fred brushed the snow off and righted an empty baby carriage.

But I think Fred’s less successful than Clare as a character. Watt makes him a prewar German immigrant, which allows her to evoke the jingoistic suspicion of an “enemy alien” who is actually a naturalized Canadian. I like the theme and how Watt plays it, but Fred’s a bit too good to be true, as if the chief victim of the narrative must be a paragon.

Leo’s more believable as a person, but what happens to him, less so. He’s a sapper, assisting the engineer officer who tunnels under German lines. Watt’s depiction of that rings true. But the narrative fudges on what the Western Front looks and feels like, and other details are simply inaccurate. Most critically—and I don’t want to reveal too much–Watt fails to consider what a civilian’s possession of a firearm in a war zone can mean, as in getting the entire village put up against a wall. Moreover, that entire setup seems designed to alter Leo in convenient ways, whereas leaving him as he was, though messier, would add depth and conflict.

Finally, I hope that what I read is an uncorrected proof — although it doesn’t say so — and that a proofreader will catch mistakes like the constant misspelling of Fred’s German name, and the typographical and grammatical errors that crop up.

Still, I enjoyed Dazzle Patterns. The story is compelling, Watt tells it with brio, and has provided a heroine worthy of your time and attention.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher via Historical Novels Review, in which this post appeared in shorter, different form.

Degas and Cassatt: I Always Loved You

02 Monday Jan 2017

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Review: I Always Loved You, by Robin Oliveira
Viking, 2014. 343 pp. $28

In 1877, the painter Mary Cassatt has reached a crossroads. The official Paris salon has just rejected her work, yet again, leading her to question whether her dream of being a painter is an egoistic fantasy. Back in Pennsylvania, her father thinks so, and since he’s supporting her life in Europe, he also thinks that gives him the right to tell his daughter–now in her early thirties–that it’s time to give up her foolishness and settle down to what a woman’s supposed to do. Not that she disagrees, entirely; Mary loves children and would like to have a husband and family, all other things being equal.

Mary Cassatt, The Boating Party, 1893-94, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Courtesy National Gallery, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Mary Cassatt, The Boating Party, 1893-94, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Courtesy National Gallery, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

But they’re not equal. With few exceptions, notably Berthe Morisot, Édouard Manet’s sister-in-law, a vivid character here, women don’t paint. They adorn canvases, share artists’ beds, offer admiration, and otherwise stay out of the way. Mary, as a foreigner, a real talent, and a woman unwilling to walk ten paces behind anyone, poses a threat to the fraternity of French painters, as a professional and a prospective marriage partner.

At this critical juncture, when the personal and artistic paths seem blocked, Cassatt meets an artist she’s long admired, Edgar Degas. Right away, he tells her that she can paint but is wasting herself trying to ape accepted styles rather than find her own. To be successful, she must serve her obsession, whatever great theme drives her to put brush to canvas. These words electrify her, as does his rigorous devotion to his art, and since he despises social convention, he takes her more seriously as a fellow professional than many of their contemporaries.

However, the social conventions Degas despises include sensitivity toward others, generosity, courtesy, kindness, keeping promises, or pulling together toward a common goal. He also has no love for anything or anyone other than himself and his art. Cassatt couldn’t be more different, so you know that whatever these two artists mean to one another, it will be a bumpy ride.

Then again, this is Paris, and the characters who populate this novel are artists–vain, gifted, self-doubting, jealous, often careless of others’ feelings. Oliveira excels at portraying this atmosphere, in which only the thick-skinned survive, and half the battle is knowing when not to put skin on the line. Consider this social gathering:

Soon after, the men abandoned their plates for the candlelit corner next to the piano, where a few rested their elbows on its ebony skin and the rest sprawled in armchairs, twirling their delicate flutes of amber champagne, which they held by their stems. No one spoke, but they eyed one another as if waiting for a starting gun, boredom and anticipation warring on their spectral faces as the flickering candlelight painted shadows on the wall. Someone lit a cigar. Mary moved to join them, but Berthe motioned to her to sit beside her on a brocade loveseat away from the men.

This tableau is like a painting, which could be titled Just Before the Verbal Fireworks. In what follows, Mary subtly bests Émile Zola, one way she proves that she belongs. But her struggle is never-ending, because that’s the artist’s lot, whether within herself, her profession, or society at large. I have to think the author is talking about writers too when she has Degas and Cassatt wrestle constantly with the “unbidden terror”: whether their work is as good as they think and hope it is, and whether the right touch will suddenly desert them, if it hasn’t already.

The stakes increase for Cassatt when her father decides to move the family back to Paris (they had lived there in Mary’s youth). Though Robert Cassatt is no longer telling her to pack up her easel and come home to Pennsylvania, he’s an impossible man, and he’s there all the time. Demanding, selfish, self-absorbed, and dedicated to the proposition that if something doesn’t make money, it’s not worth doing, he’s poison for his long-suffering daughter, who expends much energy standing up to him.

That she’s had to deal with him all her life makes her a match for Degas, whose faults loom large in these pages. Thanks to Oliveira’s fully rounded portrayal, I understand him. But I don’t like him one bit, and you have to wonder why Cassatt still bothers with him long after he’s burned her, and others, many times. There are other excellent artists within her circle, and she must have met many kinder, more sensitive men. Why, then, her fascination with a selfish boor?

As an art lover, though, I admit my biases. Degas’s work has always seemed repetitive to me–ballerinas and bathers–and it’s hard to get around his rabid anti-Semitism, though, to be fair, Paul Cézanne and Auguste Renoir shared that prejudice. On the other hand, having seen too few of Cassatt’s paintings, I’d always thought of her as a minor artist, until I visited the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., a year ago. She’s very much the real deal–Degas was right about that–and I Always Loved You does her justice.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Flesh and Faith: The Painter of Souls

18 Monday Jul 2016

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Herod's Feast, Salome's Dance, painted by Lippi between 1460 and 1464, Prato, Italy (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Herod’s Feast, Salome’s Dance, painted by Lippi between 1460 and 1464, Prato, Italy (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Review: The Painter of Souls, by Philip Kazan
Pegasus, 2015. 261 pp. $25

One pitfall of biographical fiction is the elbow-in-the-ribs aha! moment, when our protagonist meets the great and renowned on his or her way up the ladder of fame. Such scenes afflict The Painter of Souls, a novel about the fifteenth-century Florentine Carmelite painter Fra Filippo Lippi. Not only does the young–and I mean young–friar run across such luminaries as Donatello and Brunelleschi as easily as rolling out of bed, they instantly recognize his talent and praise him generously, to which he rubs his sandal in the dust and utters the Italian equivalent of “Aw, shucks.” Meanwhile, the prior gives Fra Filippo every bit of leeway, impressed with his gift, which surely comes from God, and sees no reason not to let him paint church frescoes and altar pieces under the tutelage of lay artists.

Despite these happenings, which sometimes seem too good to be true, I like The Painter of Souls. What saves the novel for me is its good-natured, winning protagonist. Pippo, to his secular friends, likes a drink, a game of dice, and has sexual fantasies about the paintings of Eve that adorn church walls. His father died when Pippo was six, and his mother has been virtually catatonic from grief ever since, leaving the boy to fend for himself. He’s learned how to beg, scrounge for food in garbage heaps, rob market stalls, fashion crude pens and ink to make drawings of passersby for pennies, and share his gains with the gang to which he belongs. Pippo comes dangerously close to letting that dead-end life swallow him altogether. Entering the church has saved him.

However, he doesn’t take well to the discipline. He wants to, but he misses too much of the outside world to accept his new surroundings, especially the restraint, which he finds excessive. The silence of the convent feels “heavy, deliberate, enforced,” its purpose to stifle noise except at prescribed times, as with bell ringing or the ponderous closing of cell doors. Pippo loves the sky, the sights, sounds, and smells of Florence, the taste of roast meat and the good grape, the glimpse of a pretty face. Or more than a glimpse, which of course leads him to sinful daydreams. How he reconciles all that with his religious faith, his desire to believe, makes the story worth while. Constant contact with painters unbound by monastic rules only increases the temptations, which he tries to channel toward its acceptable object. Beauty is divine, therefore re-creating it in religious art serves God. If, however, the act of creation involves a little transgression here and there, well, He’ll understand.

Consequently, it’s not Fra Filippo’s strengths as an artist, nor his seemingly effortless rise to fame, that make The Painter of vSouls worth reading. Rather, it’s Pippo’s weaknesses as a friar and a man that propel this novel–the whoppers he tells on the spur of the moment; the deals and excuses he makes with himself so that he can still feel honorable; his delight in the forbidden; and the pull his former life still exerts on him (and its vivid portrayal in Kazan’s deft hands). Pippo understands that he’s a sinner, and though he loves nothing more than to paint, part of him fears accepting the offer of a dispensation to remain a friar while still becoming a member of the painter’s guild, a privilege offered to very few. Who is he, a sensualist with a brush, or a man of God?

While he’s weighing this question, an artist he’s working for brings him to a barber, after whose ministrations Pippo looks in a mirror for the first time in his life:

He is looking at an almost round head, an elongated sphere, domed like a cannonball above, and gleaming from the passage of the razor. His chin is round as well, dimpled. He had no idea his mouth was so wide. There is a hunger implied in the fleshy, almost feminine curve of his lips which he finds disturbing. He looks into his own eyes. They are heavy-lidded, dark ink-brown, close-set but large, watching him, watching themselves. The irises dart, gathering, betraying an appetite, a need for satiation. This face is thinking, how will I draw you? How will you draw me?

Pippo has one other endearing trait that helps counteract the smoothness of his career arc. He believes that there’s good in everyone, and whenever he can, he uses social outcasts as his models, finding grace in them that no one else does. It’s hard to quarrel with that, and with The Painter of Souls, even if the story seems incredible, at times.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Deception: The Paris Winter

27 Monday Jun 2016

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Review: The Paris Winter, by Imogen Robertson
St. Martin’s, 2013. 360 pp. $26

If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. But Maud Heighton, the protagonist of this excellent thriller set in 1909, can’t help herself. She’s slowly starving in Paris, garden of earthly delights, while learning to become a painter at l’Académie Lafond. All Maud’s classmates are women, which keeps predatory bohemians out, but Lafond charges his female students double what he would if they were male–the image of respectability costs extra, you see.

Quai de Passy, Paris, during the flood of 1910 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Quai de Passy, Paris, during the flood of 1910 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Not that anyone of the male persuasion believes in that respectability; Maud’s brother, a lawyer back in England, disapproves of his sister’s choice to live in that sinful city, and many men freely offer their opinion that art is a masculine preserve. So as Maud’s meager funds drip away to finance her education, and as she covertly lunches on the tiny cakes served at class sessions, she’s terribly alone. She loves Paris, but it’s out of reach–and so is Maud, a proper Englishwoman who keeps her distance, living in her books and sketch pads.

In the full light of day Paris was chic and confident. The polished shops were filled with colour and temptation and on every corner was a scene worth painting. It was modern without being vulgar, tasteful without being rigid or dull. A parade of elegant originality. Only in this hour, just before dawn on a winter’s morning, did the city seem a little haggard, a little stale. . . . The streets were almost empty–only the occasional man, purple in the face and stale with smoke and drink, hailing a cab in the Place Pigalle, or the old women washing out the gutters with stiff-brushed brooms.

But Maud can’t remain impervious and aloof forever. Tanya Koltsova, a wealthy Russian classmate from Lafond’s, befriends her, determined to show her a good time and feed her enough to restore color to her cheeks. Naturally, Maud’s too proud to accept charity, but through Tanya, she learns of a situation as a lady’s companion. Sylvie Morel, a pale, blonde beauty with a sensual face who could have stepped out of a pre-Raphaelite painting by Edward Burne-Jones, is very sickly, and her older brother wants someone to coax her into the world and help her gain her strength. How perfect for Maud; it’s precisely what she needs for herself. In return for her room, board, and a princely wage, all she need do is entice Sylvie away from her sickbed, teaching her English and giving her drawing lessons.

There are complications, however. As Morel confides, Sylvie is addicted to opium, which he indulges within limits, hoping to wean her off the drug. Yet he praises Maud’s efforts to get her out and about and insists that he can see real progress.

Then a madwoman pounds on the door one day when Morel’s out–as he usually is–and forces her way into the apartment. Morel’s a thief, the woman declares, and Sylvie’s not his sister but his wife. The Morels have ruined her life, besmirched her good name. Naturally, Maud can’t believe a word and is horrified that she couldn’t ward her off; luckily, the concierge and her husband arrive in time and threw the madwoman out.

I probably don’t have to tell you that things unravel quickly from there, and that the Morels aren’t who they seem. The Paris Winter tells a gut-wrenching, dark story while exploring the theme of how money imprisons people who have too little or too much of it. I like the storytelling very much–Robertson makes skillful use of “no; and furthermore”–and most of her characters, who come from all walks of life. Tanya’s poor-little-rich-girl act wears at times, and I wish the author had given her more than a good heart, a taste for beautiful dresses, and a quest for what it means to marry for love. A worldview, maybe? But the weak link here is the Morels, who seem like sociopaths (especially Sylvie), and, as I’ve said before, I dislike thrillers or mysteries in which the villainy comes purely from psychological distortion.

Even so, I enjoyed The Paris Winter immensely.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Being Herself: Georgia

13 Monday Jun 2016

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Review: Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O’Keeffe, by Dawn Tripp
Random House, 2016. 318 pp. $28

It’s one of those stories you couldn’t make up. In 1917, a young woman teaching art at a small Texas college receives word from a famous artist in New York that he’s hung her charcoal and watercolor abstracts as part of the last show his gallery will ever house. Without telling him, she scrapes together her savings, hops a train, and gets to the gallery two days after the show has ended. The two artists’ instant attraction, fierce and tender, is like planets pulled together by gravity. But it should be recalled that planets take up a lot of space, and that they’re not meant to occupy the same place at the same time.

This is the story of Georgia O’Keeffe before, during, and after she becomes a leading artist in her own right, and of Alfred Stieglitz, the man who makes (and hinders) her career. Stieglitz doesn’t merely belong to the American avant-garde in 1917; he is the avant-garde. Not only has he redefined photography as an art form, he has a keen eye for talent and a sense of where modern art can (and should) go next, having introduced American audiences to such luminaries-to-be as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. On the basis of her few drawings, Stieglitz knows, just knows, that O’Keeffe will be Somebody, and he persuades her to let him make this happen.

Georgia O'Keeffe, photographed by Alfred Stieglitz, 1918 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Georgia O’Keeffe, photographed by Alfred Stieglitz, 1918 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Not that Georgia needs much persuasion; Alfred is an intensely charismatic man, and he gets what her work is trying to say, which to her is like a sexual lollipop. However, he’s also more than two decades older than she, married, with a daughter, not to mention that Georgia isn’t the first younger woman he’s charmed. Defying convention is all very well, but their affair poses greater risks for Georgia than Alfred, and she quickly realizes that one of these is dependence. Can she be her own person and still live with an all-consuming man old enough to be her father–and not just any father, but one who knows best? More importantly, to Georgia, can she be the artist she intends rather than the one he’s created?

These are fascinating questions, with obvious feminist implications, but since Georgia has no use for isms, she sees the struggle as one between two outsize personalities duking it out. That Stieglitz never gets what she’s asking, or why, tells you how self-absorbed he is. And yet, she wonders how he can photograph the sky, “seized something so ephemeral . . . and fixed it to paper in such a way that all I want to do is fall into the mystical sheen of the world he has rendered.” That magnetism is what keeps Georgia with Stieglitz, and Tripp makes this perfectly explicable, even as she depicts O’Keeffe’s anger at his manipulations.

Some readers will finish this novel and object that there’s no plot, only the two planets crashing together, and the resulting energy that O’Keeffe turns into amazing art. That’s true. But the titanic battle feels deep and real, greater than the sum of its parts. Much of this derives from Tripp’s prose, which grabs you and never lets go:

Later, I will look at that photograph, and there is something so domestic, so simple . . . I will look at that photograph–a small print, the size of a playing card–and I will try to remember if it was ever as simple and lovely as he made it appear. This was his gift. This is what we were entranced by. How he could capture the momentary flicker of a soul in the image of raindrops on an apple, or three people gathered around a small table at a meal–such a simple and intimate pleasure–the trees in the background, blurred.

Tripp has captured something herself, the way an artist sees. I’ve always felt that art is about seeing; incidentally, having viewed O’Keeffe’s paintings of flowers has changed the way I look at nature. But even if you’ve never seen her work, Georgia conveys that precious quality, the gift of vision granted only to a few.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

The Not-So-Belle Époque

26 Thursday Feb 2015

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Review: The Painted Girls, by Cathy Marie Buchanan
Penguin, 2013. 353 pp. $28

It’s Paris in the late 1870s, and the three van Goethem girls are living a hair’s breadth from destitution. Their father has just died, and their mother, a laundress, is too friendly with the absinthe bottle. With the landlord beating at the door, the eldest daughter, Antoinette, a mere teenager, brings the next oldest, Marie, to audition for the ballet. If eleven-year-old Marie makes the cut, she’ll get a stipend, which, however meager, will help pay the rent. Meanwhile, Charlotte, the youngest, longs to be a dancer herself, but more for the dance, not the money.

But even if the sisters enter the ballet company, there are slippers and skirts to buy, plus extra lessons without which even the most talented newcomer can’t hope to compete with her more experienced peers. Not only won’t the stipend go that far, the long hours of practice and, if she’s lucky, rehearsal for performance, drain many hours from the day. There’s little time for paying work on the side, assuming a young girl could find a job.

Unless, of course, a well-to-do gentleman who subscribes to the ballet is willing to be her patron, in which case the ballet slippers, skirts, and lessons are paid for. Perhaps too, he whispers in the director’s ear, and voilà, his protegée receives a promotion to the next of many levels within the ballet corps. Naturally, however, patronage doesn’t come for free.

This is the life that Cathy Marie Buchanan explores in The Painted Girls, and what a heart-rending tale it is. As Marie laments more than halfway through the novel,

 

I want to put my face in my hands, to howl, for me, for Antoinette, for all the women of Paris, for the burden of having what men desire, for the heaviness of knowing it is ours to give, that with our flesh we make our way in the world.

 

Marie’s one of the lucky ones. She has Antoinette to lean on, and a nearby bakery where she earns a little on the side, as well as the shy smiles of the baker’s son. Also, a painter named Degas, who prowls the ballet scene, asks Marie to model, which brings in a few more francs. But tenuous circumstances change quickly, and the van Goethems, like poor people everywhere, lack the resources to cope. Consequently, The Painted Girls shows the not-so-belle époque in its daily squalor, vividly demonstrating the social divide between artist practitioners from patrons, and the latter’s prejudices and illusions.

Dancers Practicing at the Barre, Edgar Degas (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Dancers Practicing at the Barre, Edgar Degas, 1877 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

I like the storytelling here very much (except the last forty pages or so, which sometimes dip into melodrama). I also like how the author has depicted Marie, her ballet classmates, her patron, and Degas, with subtle complexity and depth. However, I don’t understand why Antoinette falls prey to a masochistic love affair–why does he appeal to her?–though once it gets going, her blind devotion feels absolutely real and chilling. Charlotte, the youngest sister, is a nonentity, a sketch.

Buchanan has painstakingly researched the van Goethem sisters and Antoinette’s lover, all of whom existed, and of course Degas and a few others. Strangely, though, Buchanan’s Paris is almost completely interior, giving full attention to rooms and, at times, building facades, but not streets. Is this a matter of style? To suggest claustrophobia? It’s also a bit odd that certain contemporary events–the Paris Commune of 1871, for instance–rate no mention, despite their profound aftershocks.

Still, the world of The Painted Girls deserves wide attention, and so does this good novel.

Disclaimer: I borrowed my reading copy of this book from the public library.