bookshelves: novels
I participated in a roundtable on this book at Return of the Relucntant: http://www.edrants.com/sarah-hall-roundt...
Here was my take in the conversation:
I waited until this morning, until I turned the final page in How to Paint a Dead Man, to take in your perspectives on the novel. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on it, especially because in many ways they seem to differ from mine. For example, I seem to be unusual in that I very much enjoyed Sarah Hall’s book, without qualification.
Here’s why.
For me, the uncommon structure of the novel worked not simply because it assumes a gallery-like experience of peering into one frame after another, but because it is the short sections, the different forms of narrations, the four leading characters that we follow, all this serves the movement of the novel. The instability I felt as a reader in the first pages, unclear on what Hall was up to, transformed into suspense: what was Hall up to? Where is this going? In a novel that, as was mentioned, borrows from the artistic forms of landscape and still-life, the intervals we spend with each character before spinning off into another universe serves to maintain the novel’s profluence, its forward-motion.
While much has been made of Hall’s really fantastic language — she clearly is in love with words, which, frankly, is not a given among contemporary authors — some of you aren’t enamored with the fact that Hall’s language is consistent, even as she moves among her characters and her landscapes. (Though, to be sure, she does vary her vantage points among first, second, and third-person perspectives). This seems to me to be a wise choice: in a novel where so much is unsettled and atypical, using a more or less consistent language gives the reader something to hold onto as she moves through the text. It keeps the novel from veering into unhelpful fragmentation and absurdity. What’s more, the consistent language makes the textual rhymes more apparant; I found myself finishing one section where the images linger on, say, eyes and sight, and I know that that the next section will move to Annette and the stories of her pending blindness. What’s more, Hall’s language is so good, so striking, that it is an argument for itself. I’m happy to meet it, section after section.
Speaking of seeing the rhymes among the characters’ lives–you all have made plain that Girogio teaches Annette and receives letters from Peter; that Peter is Susan’s father. But there are other connections that emerged through the novel–revelations that happened not in the traditional ways of plot, but in the the authorial (painterly?) techniques that Hall embraces here: juxtaposition, association, composition.
I realized late in the novel, for example, that Tom, who Susan is having an affair with, is Annette’s littlest brother (Tommaso). It’s apparent that the bottle Annette leaves on Girogio’s grave–returning a gift he’d given to her–is the bottle that Peter steals when he’s in Italy and later gives to Susan for her exhibition of artist’s relics (though Susan never believes that it’s anything but a tall tale). Connections like these are never pushed on the reader, but emerge in the text, like delicate spices in a well-made meal, like the glimmers of movement that we see when we gaze long enough at a nature morte painting.
The novel carries its share of active tension: Peter’s horrific accident; Annette haunted by the Bestia, by her bizarre family, and the final incident at Girogio’s graveside; Susan’s secrets. But it’s no secret that this novel rides primarily on its stylistic verve. Suspense doesn’t take the usual trappings in How to Paint a Dead Man. But it’s there, in surprising costumes, and I thrilled to it.
One further point: it’s been mentioned that it seemed strange that we learn so few details about what the art made by these characters actually looks like. Such a lack of details comes in context of a novel that is emphatically a visual one. The characters spend an enormous amount of time looking at things; visual images are thick in Hall’s pages. It seems to me that the lack of narration describing Peter’s paintings, say, or Susan’s photographs is again an appropriate choice. No character is compelled to describe their own art to themselves in excruciating details, though we readers get enough information about their canvases to extrapolate; being visually-oriented, the intersections between the characters’ work and their world emerges (for example, through Peter’s life in the north country of Cumbria).
How to Paint a Dead Man is a risky novel, and it is carried by Hall’s sheer confidence and nerve. Even as it simmers under the prominence of the language and structure, this is a physical, muscular work of fiction–one that dwells on bodies, violence, sex, drugs, drunkenenss, blindness, cancer, pregnancy, movement–and so it is perhaps no surprise that it hits viscerally. ]]>
bookshelves: stories
I did a video book review of The Bigness of the World in The Collagist. http://www.thecollagist.com/archive/Nove... ]]>
bookshelves: graphic-novels, nonfiction
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bookshelves: currently-reading, novels
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bookshelves: poetry
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bookshelves: novels
I did a video book review of Driftless in The Collagist: http://www.thecollagist.com/archive/Octo... ]]>
bookshelves: nonfiction, poetry
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by Alice Walker
Yeah! ]]>