For the first time in over 20 years, I didn’t finish the book for my CAE bookgroup. Partly, it was because I forgot that we had changed the day of our meeting, bringing it forward. But also it was because at 367 small-print pages this is a far longer, denser book than I anticipated.
The story is narrated by an elderly professor, Leo Hertzberg about his life in New York between about 1975 and 2000. It is prompted by the discovery of five letters written to his neighbour and friend, the artist Bill Wechsler by Violet, the woman who was to become Bill’s second wife. They were to become neighbours, with Bill and his first, then second, wife living upstairs with their son Mark, and Leo and his wife Erica living on the floor below with their son Matt, who was of a similar age. Marriages disintegrate under the pressure of infidelity and tragedy. Leo finds himself acting as an indulgent-uncle type figure to his friend Bill’s son Mark, who proves himself unworthy of the love and indulgence extended to him as he disappears into the rave culture of New York and comes under the influence of the menacing artist Teddy Giles.
Leo is an art historian (one of the wankiest genres around, I reckon) and Bill is an artist and so there are long- far too long- descriptions of Bill’s contemporary artwork. Violet researches hysteria, anorexia and representations of the body and identity, and this is described at length too. Indeed, there is much in this book about representation and reality, and it all became rather precious and over-intellectualized.
The book starts off fairly slowly as a domestic narrative within a New York setting, but becomes far more urgent and fast-paced- dare I say, a thriller?- in the second half of the book. It really feels like a book of two halves. Leo is a gracious, self-deprecating first-person narrator, and so it felt comfortable to be in his company. The second half of the book was compelling enough that I continued to read it, even though our book group meeting came and went, but I found the descriptions of art and the self-conscious intellectualizing of the book rather tedious.
My rating: 6.5/10
Sourced from: A left-over book from the former Council of Adult Education
Read because: it was The Ladies Who Say Oooh (ex CAE) bookgroup selection.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 