The title reads like a question. It dissolves in a way that suggests the intangibility of experience. Among the recurring iterations of that theme is the halting observation of Leo's son Matt: “'...all those different people see what they see just a little different from everybody else....[B]ecause we were sitting where we were sitting tonight, we saw a game that was a little different from those guys with the beer next to us. It was the same game, but I could've noticed something those guys didn't. And then I thought, if I was sitting over there, I'd see something else. And not just the game. I mean they saw me and I saw them, but I didn't see myself and they didn't see themselves....I thought about how everybody's thoughts keep changing....'” Hustvedt captures perfectly the tentative exploratory voice of a child edging toward a profound philosophical epiphany.The narrator of this story is Leo, a professor of art history at Columbia whose wife Erica teaches English at Rutgers. Yet, the focal characters of the story are Matt and Bill. Bill is an artist and Matt, Leo's son, hopes to be an artist some day as well. Hustvedt charts the growing bond between the two, a bond that includes baseball as well as art. Mark,who is Matt's best friend and Bill's son, and Violet, who is Bill's second wife, round out the list of principals. Yet, there is a long roster of secondary characters that play critical parts in the story. Among the most memorable are Bill's autistic brother Dan, and Lazlo Finkelstein, literally a starving artist who becomes close to both Leo's and Bill's families. The point of view enables Hustvedt to invoke, through her considerable erudition, powerful images from the artworld as the story proceeds. Bill is gifted and uncompromising. Leo first knows of him 25 years ago when he purchases a riveting portrait of Violet, then the artist's model. The work with its evocative posed semi-nude and thickly applied paint exude an intimate eroticism. The composition suggests unseen figures including the artist himself, evidenced by his thumb print in the thick paint and a faint mark on the model's leg as if the artist had just touched her delicate skin. Even more puzzling, the work is titled “Self-Portrait.” The work is executed with shifting points of focus and dreamlike distortions.Later, Leo describes an exhibition, dedicated to Bill's recently deceased father Sy Wechsler. In describing the “Sy Memorial” Leo/Hustvedt makes an overt comparison to Rauschenberg's “Combines” series. The works suggest a series of images of an aging Sy, with artifacts from his life. The collages include letters, ticket stubs, a scrawled phone number, the sorts of emotionally freighted mementos that end up in junk drawers. Leo reflects: “Despite these momentary insights into a life, the canvases and their materials had an abstract quality to them, an ultimate blankness that conveyed the strangeness of mortality itself, a sense that even if every scrap of a life were saved, thrown into a giant mound and then carefully sifted to extract all possible meanings, it would not add up to a life.” (p.45)Yet, because Leo is an art historian, the author's voice never intrudes into the narrative. The voice reflects Leo's thoughts convincingly, and allows a conduit into the intensity of Leo's emotions. Leo mentions Bellini's “Madonna in a Meadow” and Holbein's “Dead Christ,” both part of the curriculum Leo teaches, and they become powerful images that connect the character to the reader. Later, when the sight of Chardin's “Glass of Water and a Coffee Pot” move Leo to tears, the reaction is totally understandable through the language Hustvedt has established between the reader and the character.Leo's narration also draws the reader into the story as an independent observer. Connections are made before the characters themselves stumble upon them. Leo has already described Lucille, Bill's first wife. She is a poet defined by an emotional absence, as if she is choosing to reside in a world populated by words and sounds rather than people. On page 29 Leo describes Bill's father Sy as a transparent, ghost-like presence. The description immediately provokes in the reader a comparison with Lucille. Leo does not come to this conclusion until page 41: “In that moment, Lucille reminded me of Sy Wechsler. The link between them was neither physical nor spiritual. Their personalities had little in common except what they both lacked – a quality of ordinary connectedness to other human beings. Lucille didn't elude only Bill, she eluded everyone else who knew her. The old adage 'He married his mother' had to be revised. Bill had married his father.” p.41 Bill does not connect with this absence about Violet until nearly a hundred pages later: “'For years, day in and day out, I lived with a fictional character, a person I'd invented.'” (p.117)The characters are in a constant state of self-realization. It's not so much growth as a comprehension of some previously overlooked part of themselves, made available for conscious scrutiny or repression by life's events. Erica and Leo's relationship shifts into the highly structured connection of letter-writing. It is the perfect métier for a professor of English, as well as an acknowledgment that their relationship if it is to endure must be reinvented. Violet is a student writing her dissertation on feminist interpretations of mental aberration, a kind of antidote to Freud, and she speaks at length about a phenomenon she calls “mixing.” It's a pathological loss of self to the expectations of society, culture, and authority. Her ideas are evidenced in Bill's projects. His “Hysteria” series includes elements of dermagraphism, which Violet has explored in her case studies of hypnotized women. However, his work integrates his own and Violet's persona, and is distilled in a kind of symbolic subconscious autobiography.Part III of the book is a departure. The pace accelerates; the drama of story-telling takes hold. All the themes Hustvedt has previously alluded to in sometimes painfully dense riffs of introspection are coming together. Art and psychology; memory and perception; mixing and re-invention; and the pursuit of ghostly presences all coalesce. This is a remarkable book. So many ideas are launched and then elaborated upon like a theme and its variations. It is an argument for the idea that books should be defined by some subjective standard of reading process rather than by genre. I found this a book to savor and re-read. It was difficult to limit the number of quotes I included in this review, the author articulates all of the ideas so well. Highly recommended to anyone who loves spectacular writing. NOTES: Giovanni Bellini's "Madonna in a Meadow" is on: http://italianrenaissanceresources.co...Holbein's "Dead Christ" is on: http://mydailyartdisplay.wordpress.co...Duccio's Madonnas are in a double panel: http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/d...http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/d...Chardin's "Glass of Water and a Coffee Pot" is on: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/47...
Every story we tell about ourselves can only be told in the past tense. It winds backward from where we now stand, no longer the actors in the story but its spectators who have chosen to speak. The trail behind us is sometimes marked by stones like the ones Hansel first left behind him. Other times the path is gone, because the birds flew down and ate up all the crumbs at sunrise.Equal parts memoir, novel of ideas, and psychological thriller, the story opens in 1975 and spans 25 years of friendship between two artsy and academic Manhattan families. The relationships commence when narrator and art historian, Leo, meets Bill, a painter whose work fascinates. The first third of the book involves much character exposition and ruminating about art and artists, some of which I briefly snoozed or skimmed through. An unexpected death opens the next third and woke me right up. The last third I could not put down, and I was occasionally so creeped out that I began questioning what I think I know about those I love most. It’s not spoiling anything to say there’s a murder. Oddly on a night when I stayed up very late reading about it, my husband was dreaming about a serial killer working his way through our family. He, my husband, looked awful at breakfast, worn out. When I asked what was wrong he said, “I just had the worst dream I’ve ever had in my life.” The worst part being all the screaming of those he could hear dying but could not get to. And I said, "Who was the killer?” And he said, “Someone we knew.” And I said, “Who?” And he said, “I don't know, but I knew it was someone we knew, and I was going crazy trying to find out.”The scenario being even more dreadful when, like Leo the narrator, you suspect that the killer is a family member. To avoid spoilers, I'll leave out the names. I knew that by some definition both --- and --- were insane, examples of an indifference many regard as monstrous and unnatural; but in fact they weren’t unique and their actions were recognizably human. Equating horror with the inhuman has always struck me as convenient but fallacious, if only because I was born into a century that should have ended such talk for good. For me, the lamp became the sign not of the inhuman but of the all-too-human, the lapse or break that occurs in people when empathy is gone, when others aren’t a part of us anymore but are turned into things. There is genuine irony in the fact that my empathy for --- vanished at the moment when I understood that he had not a shred of that quality in himself.This book is all about empathy -- its variations and qualities and how they make all the difference in all kinds of relationships. The more I read the more I appreciated and enjoyed Hustvedt’s talent for deftly navigating the complexities, from the routine to the catastrophic, with what proved to be an irresistible mix of nuance and drama. Yes, I briefly snoozed, but she more than made up for that by seducing and startling and occasionally moving me to tears, such that I'm granting 5 stars. As soon as I opened the volume (of da Vinci drawings) the letters spilled out. I read and rested, read and rested, nearly panting from the strain but hungry for the next word . . . Do you remember when you told me I had beautiful knees? I never liked my knees. In fact, I thought they were ugly. But your eyes have rehabilitated them. Whether I see you again or not, I’m going to live out my life with these two beautiful knees. The letters were full of little thoughts like that one, but she also wrote: It’s important now to tell you that I love you. I held back because I was a coward. But I’m yelling it now. And even if I lose you, I’ll always say to myself – I had that. I had him, and it was delirious and sacred and sweet. And if you let me, I’ll always dote on your whole odd, savage, painting self.Ultimately it is our salvation, that kind of finding and seeing and declaring and doting. By such gestures we redeem each other.The letters are among the talismans, icons, incantations that over time become Leo's shields of meaning and muses of memory without which, he intimately tells us, there’s no surviving when the game flirts with terror and moves me so close to the edge that I have a sensation of falling . . . and in the speed of the fall lose myself in something formless but deafening . . . like entering a scream, being a scream.
What do You think about What I Loved (2015)?
Here is a big, ambitious novel about four talented, intelligent people -- artists and intellectuals in New York -- who first find love and friendship and then immense suffering. Bill, a talented and original artist, leaves Lucille, his emotionally stunted wife, for Violet, his passionate, vivacious model. Meanwhile their friends Leo and Erica live upstairs pursuing their own ecstatic marriage. The two couples have sons almost at the same time -- Mark and Matt. They vacation together in Vermont, they make love, enjoy food and good fellowship -- life is good. And then two acts of unbearable tragedy occur (I won't reveal them) and everything is broken. One tragedy happens in an instant and provides the jarring fulcrum around which this book turns. The other occurs slowly over the course of years. The protagonists struggle to preserve their loves, the lives they have built, their sanity -- but the reality they face is too powerful. Everything falls apart; almost nothing survives the wreckage. This is an absorbing and in many ways an admirable book. It is a novel of ideas that takes art seriously and brings it to life. There are dozens of other ideas woven through it -- about the nature of sickness, of reality, of truth. The writing is vivid, the characters psychologically convincing for the most part. Yet there is a spiritual emptiness at the center of these lives, a sense of life imitating art rather than the other way around. I found this novel impressive and occasionally shocking but I was not ultimately moved by it. It kept me at an emotional distance. I responded intellectually rather than feeling the joy and the pain. I admired its artistry a little too much.
—Alan
Because I've been engaged in a book club with three others--one who likes fiction, one who likes it with reservations, and a third who views it with trepidation--I've been thinking about why I like fiction so much. Modern fiction, classic fiction, whatever--what always draws me is the way human nature is portrayed. What does it mean to be human? Is it sad, broken, lonely, joyful, complicated? Yes.This book is, for me, the dream of fiction, in that it tells us a story, and transports us, while at the same time tells us something about ourselves and our kind. The protagonists talk about friendship, loss, lust, grief, regret, art, and lies; they are betrayed and left behind and injured just as they are loved and buoyed and nurtured. They are beautiful and imperfect. On every page I found something to love, something tender, bold, or poignant. I won't bother giving you a synopsis, because you can get that nearly everywhere else. What I will give you is my heartfelt recommendation. Siri Hustvedt places each word, each sentence, with the deliberate deftness of someone who understands the gorgeous twisting combined pain and pleasure of being alive.
—Carolee Wheeler
Siri Hustvedt’s “What I Loved” is an unflinching dissection of two couples living in NYC circa the era of controversial performance art, raves and ecstasy, each with one son, all four adults involved in art or studies that involve the human body in what I’ll call extremes – mentally and/or physically disturbing. The book raises so many questions it’s hard to know where to begin. What constitutes art? What is the boundary between art and exploitation? The narrator, Leo, is an art historian and his BFF Bill is an artist whose main body of work consists of boxes of various sizes that contain scenes and objects that puzzle, repel, and attract. Works that cause strong reaction both positive and negative. Hustvedt chooses not to tell in which way Bill’s childhood was troubled, but his brother Dan is mentally troubled and institutionalized. And as the book goes on, the focus is on Mark, Bill’s son. Gradually Mark sociopathic tendencies manifest themselves as he becomes involved with Giles, whose art is violent and questionable. There is a lot of emotional pain in this book. It is not for the feint of heart. I tussled with the male voice from the get go in this book. Three pages in I realized the narrator was male and not female. (Okay, okay. Perhaps a man can think like a woman.) But even after settling in to Leo’s narration and realizing what an intelligent book this is, I question Hustvedt’s choice of voice. I thought this choice also forced women’s issues, so prominent in the first part of the book, to evaporate as the story went on and the women dealt with their hardships by moving on to new lives, while the men never recovered. That said, focusing on the men and having all the characters play the roles as they did, made for a more interesting and discussable story. So I have my quibbles, but I do not wish to deter interested readers from this book. It is perhaps one of the best books I’ve read on the essence (or non-essence) of art and the mystification of mental illness. But get your constitution up first.
—Mmars
