Word: novels
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Tatge also says that this project was novel in the way it was conceived...
This makes one appreciate Hugo Whittier, the narrator and quasi-hero of Kate Christensen's remarkable novel The Epicure's Lament (Doubleday; 351 pages), all the more. At 40, Hugo is a lazy, handsome, brilliant, bitter, unscrupulous trust-fund dilettante who--having failed miserably as a drug dealer, gigolo and writer--is rattling around his ancestral mansion in upstate New York, waiting to die. Hugo is a coldhearted bastard, or he likes to think he is, and he spews hilariously venomous bile on anyone who comes within range. He is also a snob, a genuine sophisticate who sits around musing...
This new generation of art novels is different from Lust for Life (about Van Gogh) and The Agony and the Ecstasy (Michelangelo). Irving Stone's old blockbusters were the testosterone-laden version of art history. The central voice now is more likely to be a woman's. In Sarah Dunant's agile new novel, The Birth of Venus (Random House; 394 pages), the fictional narrator is Alessandra Cecchi, 14, the daughter of a wealthy cloth merchant in the Florence of Michelangelo and Botticelli. Alessandra yearns to live with a brush in her hand. For that matter, she would be happy...
...Renaissance wasn't available to Susan Vreeland for her new book, The Forest Lover (Viking; 333 pages). Vreeland's previous novel was The Passion of Artemisia, about the Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi. Vreeland's heroine this time is the Canadian painter Emily Carr, who died in 1945, after devoting her life to painting Canada's Pacific coastal woodlands and its native tribes in a swelling, Expressionist style. For much of that time, Carr was scorned not only as a woman determined to paint but also as one who ventured into the wilderness to do it. Worse, her most beloved motif...
Carr's story has the stuff of drama; Vreeland's novel does not. She doesn't have the advantage in this book of Gentileschi's personal turmoil: her rape by one of her father's studio assistants, leading to a well-documented trial. Time and again, Carr encounters the same obstacles: hostile critics, philistine neighbors. Time and again, folks point out that she's a rebel. Eventually, she triumphs anyway. In the future, Vreeland might want to choose a more absorbing artist or give her a more complex internal life. Georgia O'Keeffe, call your agent...