The GoodShortNovels.com Review--One Recent Release and One Classic
Ways of Seeing
THE PORTRAIT and REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE
Reviewer: Stedman Mays
Recent Release
THE PORTRAIT by Iain Pears. Riverhead Books, 2005. Hardcover. 211 pages of sparsely laid-out text. Estimated length: about 52,000 words.
Is there anyone who hasn’t been damaged by critical comments at some point in his or her life? I certainly have, and I don’t know anyone who hasn’t. Being criticized is a fact of life--and no one is immune. We all have egos that can be bruised, despite how tough we might seem on the surface.
Iain Pears has taken on this ugly fact of life in his new novella THE PORTRAIT--an often compelling, if sometimes glib, historical thriller centered around the relationship between a painter and an influential art critic. The time period of the story is from the late nineteenth century to the early years of the twentieth century.
Henry MacAlpine has left his successful career as a portrait painter behind him in
Naysmyth journeys to Houat to sit for the portrait--circa 1912. As the artist is painting the second truer likeness of the critic in the remoteness of the tiny difficult-to-reach island, so too does the truth come out about how the critic has done irreparable harm--by means of vicious reviews and vicious behavior--to members of MacAlpine’s artistic circle. The novel is narrated by the artist in the present tense in a sort of “my brain is speaking out loud and I’m holding nothing back” style. What we experience as a reader is an extended monologue recounting MacAlpine’s evolution as an artist with numerous critical and philosophizing asides on the nature of art and criticism. These asides contain some of the best material in the book. Pears vigorously challenges any naive assumption one might have about the critic’s claim to evenhanded neutrality. Subjective motivations and power plays inevitably creep into criticism, no matter how purely objective the critic tries to be--or, to seem, in the case of William Naysmyth.
Some parts of the story of MacAlpine’s life and background are less successfully rendered, however. He hates his mother, for example, and there isn’t enough detail for the reader to completely understand why. This is an omission that mars the narrative, since his mother seems to have emotionally punished her son to the point that he feels justified in stealing almost all her money and getting revenge later in life on anyone who’s wronged him. I also felt that the narrative moved too quickly over some other intriguing subjects, such as the artist’s vaguely alluded to past sins, his passion for a woman with whom he is infatuated, and his being shunted off by his father to live with his grandmother. Including a bit more incisive detail on those subjects would have warmed up the artist’s character and made him pulse with a greater sense of life, psychological complexity, and full-roundedness of being. There’s so much snideness and sneering throughout that more moments of vulnerability and sincerity of feeling would be welcome. And some of the dramatic revelations near the end could have stood more emotional texturing and nuance to fully engage the reader as well.
But I feel that I’m complaining too much. Most books offer so little, it seems barbarous to register too many reservations. And I think it’s a good thing that THE PORTRAIT makes me hesitate and reflect on my own position as a commentator. I am rather self-conscious criticizing a book about the relationship between artistic object and critic. This is a thought-provoking novel, well worth reading--and commenting on. Pears is best known for his very long historical mystery AN INSTANCE OF THE FINGERPOST; it's admirable that this recent effort is taut and lean, signaling that he's not stuck writing one book after another of the same scale. THE PORTRAIT is a devilishly entertaining exploration of the wounded psyche of an artist who turns the tables on that godlike nemesis--the critic.
Classic Revisited
REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE by
Voyeurism can be defined as desire at a distance. The peeping Tom--or peeping Tina, as the case may be--has erotic yearnings for what he or she is watching, but actual consummation with the secretly viewed object, though longed for in theory, is often avoided in practice. Or if consummation does occur, then the voyeuristic spell is broken and the desire-at-a-distance dynamic is changed irrevocably. Pure voyeurism can only maintain the erotic thrill by avoiding direct sexual contact. The “peeper” satisfies his or her hunger in the eye alone.
REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE is Carson McCullers’s brilliant meditation on the voyeuristic impulse and how it plays out in the lives of a group of quietly desperate people affiliated with a military base in
By contrast, the narrator does seem rather hard on and condescending to a few of her characters in several fleeting comments about them (their stupidity or pettiness, etc.), and these minor lapses are unfortunate. I felt she should have let the situation speak for itself in these instances. But it's nitpicky to make too much of this. The lapses of condescension are very few and very far between. The narrator's overriding tone is one of guarded compassion for the foibles of people disoriented both by accidents of fate and by some of the choices they have made, especially the intensely conflicted marriages they seem to be stuck in. The book seems to be saying that we're all vulnerable.
The movie version of REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE from 1967, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando as husband and wife, is as underappreciated as the book on which it is based.
The plot of REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE--in both the book and the movie--is as artfully distilled as Greek tragedy. Although THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER is the novel for which McCullers has been most highly praised in literary circles, her REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE is one of the finest examples of Southern Gothic literature that we have, a masterpiece of mixed sexual signals and voyeuristic fetishism. It deserves a wider audience. Perhaps readers now are in a better position than ever to appreciate these haunting representations of desire gone askew.
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