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It is a tale played out against a subtly disquieting background of illness, oddity, and mental disorder which, through the figure of Bill’s son, Mark, gradually comes to dominate Leo’s life. There is nothing crudely linear about the process, but as his academic interests shift from the lucid world of Piero della Francesca to the horrors of Goya’s black art, so the certainties of human relations are tested in a struggle for Mark’s soul.
As with any decent novel, the strengths of this one lie in the characterisation and control of plot, beautifully sustained through the darkening middle section of the work and into its bleak finale. At the core is a celebration of love and friendship, but at the book’s end Leo is left with nothing, a moral man stranded by loss and betrayal in a world whose moral ambiguities are brilliantly enshrined in the Sporus-like creation of Teddy Giles.
And in Teddy Giles – an installation artist of genuine malevolence with a penchant for mutilated bodies – we have another of the strengths of Siri Hustvedt’s book. There is an almost Dickensian supporting cast, and Hustvedt is just as good at realising the eccentric and sometimes endearing minor characters as she is with the great themes of love, loss and grief that dominate her novel.
She writes revealingly too about the mechanics of the SoHo art world and invents for Bill Wechsler an entirely convincing career as he moves from figurative canvases through constructions and on to video art, describing his works with an immediacy that makes it hard to remember that she has made them all up. ‘The hand that had painted the picture,’ Leo writes of his first Wechsler acquisition, a portrait of a woman who comes to play a central role in both their lives,
hid itself in some parts of the painting and made itself known in others. It disappeared in the photographic illusion of the woman’s face
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