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TITLE: Life Drawing
AUTHOR: Robin Black
GENRE: General Fiction
PUBLISHED: July 15, 2014
RATING: ★★★★ 1/2
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon.com
MOBILISM LINK: Mobilism
Description: In Life Drawing, her gorgeously written first novel, Robin Black unfolds a fierce, honest, and moving portrait of a woman, and of a couple’s life—the betrayals and intimacies, the needs and regrets, the secrets that sustain love and the ones that threaten to destroy it.
Augusta and Owen have moved to the country, and live a quiet, and rather solitary life, Gus as a painter, Owen as a writer. They have left behind the city, and its associations to a troubled past, devoting their days to each other and their art. But beneath the surface of this tranquil existence lies the heavy truth of Gus’s past betrayal, an affair that ended, but that quietly haunts Owen, Gus and their marriage.
When Alison Hemmings, a beautiful British divorcée, moves in next door, Gus, feeling lonely and isolated, finds herself drawn to Alison, and as their relationship deepens, the lives of the three neighbors become more and more tightly intertwined. With the arrival of Alison’s daughter Nora, the emotions among them grow so intense that even the slightest misstep has the potential to do irrevocable harm to them all
With lyrical precision and taut, suspenseful storytelling, Black steadily draws us deeper into a world filled with joys and darkness, love and sorrows, a world that becomes as real as our own. Life Drawing is a novel as beautiful and unsparing as the human heart.
Review: As a lover of literary fiction, with a weakness for new authors, I looked forward to this novel for several months. Sometimes, literary fiction has an emphasis too much on its literary aspect, the writer in love with his/her own words, wherein descriptions of a mere landscape (scene or setting) can take paragraphs and we readers must break out the dictionary at least once a page - while nothing much happens in the way of plot and character development. Other times, the emphasis is on the fiction, the story could be extremely convoluted and multilayered, the characters numerous, and we must suspend disbelief several times. Sometimes, literary fiction is neither: the language is straightforward but well crafted, the plot flows neatly and in one direction, its whole makes sense to even the casual reader. Life Drawing is one of those books.
Black is a seasoned writer, the author of the excellent short story collection, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You. It's always interesting to read a first novel by someone who has only written short stories. I always wonder whether the subject or inspiration for the book came from the author's own life. What was so compelling this time that he/she is able to keep the words flowing, to keep the characters alive long enough to write an entire novel? In this case, I don't know if Robin Black has her own personal experience with the loss of a partner, or infidelity, but I can sense she is or has been a veteran of a long term marriage or long term relationship. She gets the dynamics just right.
For example, Gus contemplates...
But Owen was Owen. Owen was me. I was Owen. Anger and all. Betrayals and all. Owen would walk into a room and I might well want to kill him—so to speak—but at the same time, for much of my life, I couldn’t really have told you where I left off and he began. And then he died. Leaving me standing at a window, staring into a landscape as though, well, as though he might just reappear one day. Of course.
Gus and Owen live in seclusion on a farmhouse in the country.
Our friends back in Philadelphia, incurably urban, thought we were mad, and we both rather enjoyed that part. In our crowd it was hard to latch onto any eccentricity no one else had yet claimed. Overnight we became oddballs, objects of affectionate eye rolling and shaking heads. They'll be back in a week.
Built in 1918, it was exactly the kind of lovely we’d been looking for. We saw it first on a breezy day in May when the land shimmered with every leaf imaginable, from ground to sky. I thought we'd stumbled onto the hidden spot in which the universe tested out its most exquisite shades of green. The pond, perfectly round, had a fairy-tale look, frog princes poised to set themselves on its edge. I have fallen in love very few times in my life, and once was with those seven acres, our home, on that day.
The book is effectively narrated in first person by the wife, Augusta (Gus), a solid and dependable narrator. Right away, Gus lets us know that her husband is dead:
In the days leading up to my husband Owen’s death, he visited Alison’s house every afternoon. I would watch him trudge over the small, snowy hill between our two properties, half the time away from me, half the time toward me. And I would wonder what he thought about as he went. Wonder too if Alison watched him from a window of her own, and whether the expression she saw on his face as he approached was very different from the one I saw as he came home.
This technique has the effect of engendering a certain detachment from the husband, Owen, since we already know he is dead, and now suspect he has been unfaithful - we bristle immediately: who is this "Alison" he is visiting every afternoon? As it turns out, there are really only four characters in this novel: Gus, the artist wife, Owen, the author husband, Alison, the neighbor, and Nora, her college age daughter. Secondary characters are Jan, Gus' lesbian sister who plays a very minor role, Bill, a man she had an affair with (we meet him only through Gus' memories) and Laine, Bill's college age daughter, who Gus mentored and is still in touch with, she makes only a brief appearance in one chapter. The setting is simple, it takes place on their farm during the winter, other scenes are told only through Gus' memories. This book is a fairly easy, enjoyable read and covers familiar territory for most contemporary readers. In fact, this novel about marriage, friendship, and betrayal is so realistic, I felt as if I were spying on Owen and Gus, especially when they were in bed. I've read very few novels which really "get" mature middle-age relationships in any depth. I think many authors believe that mature relationships with middle aged people are unexciting, that their day to day lives aren't compelling. But they certainly are, at least in this relationship. This portrait of a mature marriage with all the little everyday tensions, betrayals, familiarities and unspoken words is spot-on.
Gus discovers Alison's daughter, Nora, has a crush on Owen. Owen claims it is flattering but unrequited...
We had sex that night in the tiny bedroom down the hall from his parents. It wasn't sweet and it wasn't particularly loving. We were both drunk by then, both unguarded and both hungry for connection. At one point when he was deep inside me, I said, “Are you really sure you don't want to do this with her?” And looking right at me, he said, “I never told you that.” I wanted to hate him, maybe I did; but I could also barely stand the level of excitement that I felt.
“Fuck you, Owen,” I said, for the second time that day.
The book moves steadily toward its conclusion - although it is too staid to be perceived as a mystery or thriller, we continue to wonder about Owen throughout the book as we learn about the characters - we want to find out exactly what happened to him, and why. Several subplots crystallize: Gus’ father has dementia and lives in a facility nearby. Alison and Gus become good friends, a surprise to Gus, who has been living in seclusion with only her husband for company. Gus becomes obsessed with an art project involving painting portraits of dead wartime soldiers, before this project she was unable to paint faces and they still give her difficulty (thus one of the meanings of the title). Much of the novel has a day to day feel, we see relationships develop over time.
Well what did happen to Owen? When we find out, I already had an inkling of what was to come. It wasn't a mystery - the dearth of characters made that impossible - and we knew Owen was dead - yet when it happened, it still came as a surprise. My sole criticism is that I would like to see much more in depth exploration and character development regarding the relationship between Owen and Nora. All the other relationships are so well drawn, it was confusing that their particular relationship remains a mystery - and it is the key to the final chapters of the book. I didn't see their relationship as desirable, plausible, the motivations and timeline for it didn't really make sense, and I think Black should explore that aspect a little more to provide us readers resolution and clarity regarding her character's motivations.
Overall, this novel is an excellent reading experience for anyone. In particular, I feel that women who have experienced long term relationships or have grappled with infidelity will really enjoy reading Life Drawing and will identify with the characters. 4.5 stars.
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