What I Loved

by Siri Hustvedt

Paperback, 2003

Publication

Sceptre (2003), 384 pages

Original publication date

2003

Description

This is the story of two men who first become friends in 1970s New York, of the women in their lives, and of their sons, born the same year. Both Leo Hertzberg, an art historian, and Bill Weschler, a painter, are cultured, decent men, but neither is equipped to deal with what happens to their children - Leo's son drowns when he's 12, while Bill's son Mark grows up to be a delinquent, and the acolyte of a sinister, guru-like artist who spawns murder in his wake. Spanning the hedonism of the eighties and the chill-out nineties, this multi-layered novel combines a plot of mounting menace with a deeply moving account of familial relationships and a superbly observed portrait of an artist, set against the backdrop of a society reaching new depths of depravity in its frenetic quest for the next fashion, drug and thrill.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member lauralkeet
Leo Hertzberg, an art history professor in New York City, narrates this story, reflecting on a quarter century of friendship with artist Bill Wechsler and his wife Violet. Leo first met Bill after discovering one of his paintings. At the time, Bill was married to another woman, Lucille. Leo and his
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wife Erica befriended Bill and Lucille, and each woman gave birth to a son within weeks of each other. When Bill's marriage to Lucille broke up over Violet, Leo and Erica quickly accepted the new arrangement, and the two families were nearly inseparable for just over a decade. Then tragedy struck, and Leo & Erica's relationship foundered. Bill and Violet remained their steadfast friends, even as they began to experience problems with their own son Mark, who was hanging out with questionable characters from New York's art and club scene. Leo became even closer to Bill and Violet as they struggled to understand what wass happening to their son.

I had a three main problems with this book. First, I'm not "into" the whole art scene: artists, openings, controversy over artistic methods and interpretation, and so on. The first 130 pages (Book One) is full of this stuff -- what a good friend called, "a lot of big city academic masturbation." I really wondered if anything was ever going to happen. Book Two promised more action and plot development, and even introduced an element of suspense around Mark. I found myself guessing outcomes, trying to find the twisted truth behind the written word.

Then my second problem arose: the suspense completely fell flat. There were no surprise twists, no skeletons that suddenly leapt from closets to show me how I'd been deceived all along. It was just a classic case of a troubled kid, corrupted by seedy characters, enmeshed in situations that escalated out of control. And finally -- my third problem -- I couldn't get close to the principal characters. At one point, after the aforementioned tragedy, I felt extremely sorry for Leo and Erica. But the rest of the emotional highs and lows fell flat for me, as if I were watching the story unfold from a great distance. All in all, this book was a disappointment.
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LibraryThing member SandDune
As an old man, partially blind, the retired art historian Leo Hertzberg looks back upon his marriage to Erica, his experience of fatherhood and above all his long friendship with artist Bill Weschler, Bill's first wife Lucille and second wife Violet, and his son Mark. From the early days of Bill's
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career (when Leo bought the first of his paintings) to the time when Bill is the darling of the art world (at least in Europe if not quite in New York) the families are close. The Weschlers even move in to the apartment above the Hertzberg's, and the closeness is further emphasized when their two baby boys are born within a few weeks of each other.

Much of the first part of the book chronicles Leo and Bill's growing friendship, the breakdown of Bill's first marriage to Lucille and subsequent marriage to Violet and detailed descriptions of Bill's art and Violet's study of the perception of hysteria in nineteenth century women. But at the start of Part Two a family tragedy occurs which throws the comfortable life of the couples into disarray, and which influences their lives for the remainder of the book.

I have to say that I didn't really enjoy this book at all. I didn't find the general depiction of the New York art world at all appealing, and the specific depictions of Bill's art were tedious and far too lengthy. And I didn't really care about or believe in any of the characters. Bill in particular is supposed to be a charismatic character ('Bill had glamour - that mysterious quality of attraction that seduces strangers' and when Leo was introduced to him he 'felt like a dwarf who had just been introduced to a giant'), but I certainly didn't think that this magnetism was conveyed to the reader. As the book develops it seems to develop more of the characteristics of a psychological thriller, raising certain expectations about how the rest of the book will develop, but then seems to lose these again so the expectations are dashed.

I would probably not have finished this book if it hadn't been my next RL book club choice. To be honest I'd doubt if I'd have got beyond page 10 or so.
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LibraryThing member jennyo
A friend sent me this book a few months ago. I picked it up late last year, but was too distracted to pay proper attention to it at the time. I picked it up again a couple of days ago and was riveted by the story. The writing was simple and elegant, and the story was absolutely devastating. I got
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to the end of Book One the night before last, and I knew, I just knew, what was going to happen when I turned the page. I tried to put the book down and not start Book Two, but I couldn't help myself. I read the first sentence and then was up most of the night reading more.

One of my favorite bits in the story was when Violet describes what it's like to be young:

"When you're young, I think it's harder to know what you want, how much of others you're willing to take in. When I was living in Paris, I tried on ideas about myself like dresses."

And another bit where Leo describes the impact of viewing Bill's hours and hours of videotapes of children:

Above all, the tapes revealed the furious animation of children, the fact that when conscious they rarely stop moving. A simple walk down the block included waving, hopping, skipping, twirling, and multiple pauses to examine a piece of litter, pet a dog, or jump up and walk along a cement barrier or low fence. In a schoolyard or playground, they jostled, punched, elbowed, kicked, poked, patted, hugged, pinched, tugged, yelled, laughed, chanted, and sang, and while I watched them, I said to myself that growing up really means slowing down.

Even though this story broke my heart, I loved it, and I'll look for more of Hustvedt's work
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LibraryThing member japaul22
This is a hard book for me to review. I read Hustvedt's brand new book, The Blazing World last year and loved it so I've been looking forward to trying more of Hustvedt's work. What I Loved has a lot in common with The Blazing World; both books revolve around the contemporary art world and show
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Hustvedt's vast knowledge of art and literary scholarship. But where I thought this knowledge served the story well in The Blazing World, I ended up feeling like the long art descriptions and academic discourses disrupted the plot and made me dislike the pretentious characters.

[What I Loved] is told from the point of view of Leo Hertzberg, an art history professor who is looking back on his adult life. He starts his story with meeting a artist named Bill Weschler. Bill is unhappily married to Lucille and Leo is just married to Erica. The four become friends and both have sons around the same time. Bill ends up leaving Lucille for Violet, a woman he has used in his paintings. Leo and Erica embrace Violet as Lucille was always hard to deal with. The first part of this book is filled with their adult relationships and academic endeavors. It is the part that I found a bit pretentious.

The second part begins with a tragedy. Leo and Erica's son, Matt, dies in a boating accident while he's away at camp. This part of the book almost did me in. The way that Hustvedt writes about and dwells in grief was too intense for me. I had to put the book aside for a few days and seriously contemplated not returning to it. I suppose the realism says something positive about her writing but it was almost too much for me. I made it through the heart of that section though, and it got easier to read from there.

The third part focuses of Bill's son, Mark. Mark is a troubled youth - lying constantly, taking drugs, and in with the wrong crowd, including an adult artist who produces highly violent and graphic art and is something of a sensation in the art world. Mark's character is never fully revealed; it remains a bit murky whether he is evil at heart or has fallen in to the wrong crowd. The relationships between Leo, Bill, Violet, and Erica really have fallen apart by the end of the book, in part due to the tragedy in part 2 and in part due to Mark's behavior. (I'm being a bit oblique here to not give away some plot elements)

As I write about this book, I realize that there is a lot to think about here and that I did appreciate the quality of the writing and the ideas Hustvedt develops. Unfortunately, I didn't really connect with this book and found some of the plot elements too sad to let me enjoy the book. I also think I didn't really ever like Leo, which doesn't help in a first person narrative.

I will read more of Hustvedt's work, but wouldn't really recommend this one as a starting point.
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LibraryThing member s_mcinally
I picked this up one saturday afternoon when I had the whole weekend to do nothing but sit on my own. I devoured this book and loved every page. I was in the mood for exactly what it was. it is beautifully written.
LibraryThing member ShawnMooney
The plot was interesting, and Hustvedt's prose competent. Parts of the story were momentarily moving to me: the dynamic between narrator Leo and his friend Bill's wayward son Mark, especially. Alas, that's the most enthusiastic I can get about this book. Ultimately, what I hated about What I Loved
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was the clunky overlay of abstruse academic theorizing that I think Hustvedt meant to weave deeply into the narrative, but ends up, for me at least, clouding and burdening it instead. It's very difficult to successfully knit academic intellectual themes and preoccupations into a novel; What I Loved demonstrates for me how that failure makes for a muddled, middling book.
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LibraryThing member heckles001
A beautiful, engaging novel set in the New York artistic/academic scene predominantly in the 1980s and 90s. The characters are rendered so intimately, so gently and without pretension, by the end of the first section I felt that they were personal friends.

Questions of identity. love, loss and
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psychological health (or otherwise) raise this book above the average well-written story of flawed human beings struggling with the lives they create for themselves and the circumstances presented to them.

Thanks to Leanne for the recommendation; I'll certainly seek out more of Hustvedt's work.
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LibraryThing member otterley
A fascinating book about life, love, art, bereavement, creativity and psychosis, set in New York's global art, literary and media community from the 60s to the 90s. Hustvedt's bold choice in using a first person male narrative voice works for me and delivers some interesting ambiguities - her
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narrator is a critic and an observer, someone who experiences emotions but cannot properly externalise and deal with them. Other characters create worlds through art, and we can see the character of their art in the way they live their lives - often fractured, complex, intractable. While this may seem rarified, the book deals with harrowing bereavement, family life in all its complexities and pleasures, and also has a narrative that drives the reader on. Hustvedt's descriptive powers lead the reader into very close reading of a deceptive simply prose style. In all, not just a fascinating description of a particular world, but also a book that digs deep into all of our insecurities and emotions. Well worth reading.
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LibraryThing member AddictedToMorphemes
What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt

Intelligent novel about the decades-long friendship between art historian, Leo Hertzberg, and painter, Bill Wechsler, and their families. Their friendship was forged by their mutual enjoyment of art and the discussions surrounding it in its variations and how people
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perceive it. They were both married to intellectuals. Bill's first wife, Lucille, was a poetess; his second wife, Violet, and Leo's wife, Erica, were both writers of very deep and serious subjects, i.e. hysteria, mental illness, eating disorders, etc. There is a lot of time spent listening to their discourses about all of these subjects in great detail. As the years passed, the troubles in their lives pushed these writers, I think, into focusing on some of these subjects as a means to solve the mysteries in their own lives.

There is a discussion at one point about a facet of Bill's work that seems to include the "intermixing" of people, man portrayed as a woman, the merging of two into one, the use of synonyms as puns, etc., and throughout the book, you see how this actually happens amongst the characters themselves. Their importance to each other becomes like a need to hold onto someone so tightly that you become part of them, or the compulsion to love what another loves just to feel closer to the person who loves it.

I really enjoyed the descriptions of the actual artwork created by Bill and even the drawings made by Leo's son, Matthew. The hidden meaning of their art (never fully explained but guessed at) and the correlation between the art and what actually happened in all of their lives over the years was given a lot of importance in the story. Their art seemed to have a prescient quality to it that revealed a knowledge about people and events long before they had to face their frustrations, misery and grief.

I perceived what I thought was foreshadowing in this book that never seemed to come to fruition, i.e. hints about Lucille's young son, Oliver's, paternity. I was also frustrated by some teasing suggestions that there were some new truths to be revealed surrounding the death of an 11-year-old boy, especially when it seemed (possibly, potentially) connected to the deviance shown by his best friend years later.
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LibraryThing member samsheep
I got a little weary of the fairly heavy intellectual content, especially the descriptions of artworks, but it has real emotional depth and grip. I'm not sure I'd re-read it but I found it very moving in places.
LibraryThing member Petroglyph
Ugh. I couldn't finish this one: too much self-important chatter, too many navel-gazing characters in a plotless morass of reminiscence, too many hyper-detailed descriptions of works of art that we're told for pages on end are truly great and impressive and all the 1980s NYC yuppies loved them.
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Hustvedt seems to think that belonging to the class of the intelligentsia is such Serious Business that it renders her characters emotionless and unlikeable even when they are talking about the things that fascinate them.

I persevered until the first pages of the second part, and still the navel gazing and the self-absorption simply would not stop. That's when I realized I'd much rather be cleaning the flat than force myself to continue reading this boring melodrama.

I still gave this book two stars because it was clear to me that Hustvedt can write: she has insights and ideas and can convey them (at least part of the time) succinctly and poignantly. The execution of this book, however, is just one poor choice after another, and there is too little in the way of style, contents or framing to make this any more than a failed novel.
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LibraryThing member jmoncton
What I Loved - was not this book. What I liked was the writing style - good flow, captivating descriptions and the characters felt real and complex. But the overall plot had a meandering feel and reading the book felt like seeing the middle part of a good movie. Interesting story, but not sure
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exactly what was the overall purpose or direction of the story. The plot centers around two families, the Hertzbergs and the Weschlers. Leo Hertzberg, an art historian, discovers a remarkable painting and tracks down the artist, Bill Weschler. The two form a lifelong friendship that evolves into an intricate web of ties between their two families. Their wives, Erica and Violet, and their sons, Matthew and Mark, each develop their own close friendship. They live in the same building, spend their summer vacations together, and they seem inseparable. But their close friendship becomes strained when a tragedy strikes and changes everything. I thought the way Hustvedt dealt with the feelings of grief and betrayal was excellent - I could definitely feel that sense of loss and anger. But everything seemed to deteriorate up to a point and then just stagnate. I'm not looking for a happy ending, but I didn't feel like there was a reason for the ending. Why not continue the story for another 20 pages of sadness and blahness. Or end it 20 pages earlier. Overall I was left with that dissatisfying feeling of reading a story and not quite 'getting it'.
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LibraryThing member astrologerjenny
This cautious, detailed novel, set in New York City, is slow but well worth reading. It’s about the NYC art world, about marriage, and about understanding and being understood. The narrator, Lev Hertzman, is an art historian, and it’s the story of his friendship with an artist, Bill Wechsler.
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Surrounding both men are their wives and sons, and each character is drawn vividly through small expressive gestures.

Bill, the artist, depicts what he loves symbolically, while Lev, the art historian, interprets these constructions. Their wives, Erica and Violet, are academics, who find their own ways of connecting to the world around them. Bill’s first wife, Lucille, is a poet who chooses very carefully what and how to love, and leaves all the rest behind.

This novel makes the point that we often love what is wounded, and these flaws in others provide soft openings for our own feelings. But one of the characters is flawed to the extent that he cannot take in or return love. And so this is also a novel about the rejection or denial of love, and about mental illness.
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LibraryThing member mbergman
I gave up on this one, which struck me as a pretentious novel narrated by an art history professor about an artist.
LibraryThing member rdurie
On balance I enjoyed this book, mainly for the quality of the writing and the way she brought the characters to life. However, for me it had a number of shortcomings.

I found the detailed descriptions of the artworks and Violet's hysteria thesis tedious in the extreme. Why do authors insist on
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bulking up their novels with this sort of material? Byatt's The Children's Book is similarly full of needless historical detail. The story should be able to stand on its own.
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LibraryThing member rubabbel
A mesmerising and oddly structured book. The shift in dramatic events is thoroughly unexpected and kind of unrealistic but her writing keeps you hooked (and unexpected it may be, but apparently based loosely on her own experiences with her husband's child). I know this is a divisive book, people
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either seem to love it or hate it.
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LibraryThing member LBK
engrossing descriptions of artworks (i wanted to see them). intelligent fiction, many subtle vignettes where she noticed small moments in existence. captured aging male voice well (i think?) . found climax a little improbable. eerie second half.
LibraryThing member DougJ110
As fine a book as I have ever read. Beautifully written with intriguing characters and a solid, slice of life storyline.
LibraryThing member birdy47
Did enjoy this book, although it took me a long time to really get into it.
LibraryThing member thatotter
Argh...another book I thought I'd like a lot more than I did. First, I thought it was too many things at once: exploration of visual art and its meaning + psychological thriller + intellectual literary fiction. I found the portions that dealt with the underbelly of the 90s rave scene to be the
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weakest and the least connected to the rest of the book.

I also felt like the narrative voice was slightly off, in that Leo was not believable to me as a man. I felt like I could tell he was being written by a woman.

My last complaint is that there was so much focus on exactly how the paintings looked. Books are not a visual medium, and I thought it was a bit of a waste spending that many pages describing how the pictures looked Just So. Maybe this comment reveals that I just didn't get the point, I don't know.
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LibraryThing member aseikonia
A compelling, intelligent read with colorful details about art and the New York art world in the late 70s and 80s.
LibraryThing member musichick52
This novel is an intense psychological study of each of its characters. In that respect, it bogged down for me. Reading it took time and concentration and a huge effort to keep going, the equivalent of a marathon road race. When you finally complete it, however, you feel as if you really
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accomplished something. Relationships are topsy-turvy and the partners are never really okay with the outcomes. Parenting skills suffer from an excess of over-caring. Does anyone come away unharmed?
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LibraryThing member Fliss88
Tried to read this on the recommendation of a friend..... found it way too depressing, didn't finish.
LibraryThing member bodachliath
Siri Hustvedt's latest novel "The Blazing World" was the first I read. After this, she is fast becoming one of my favourite writers, and both books are potential classics. In a sense they are companion pieces, set in the New York art world and dealing with psychological theories and disorders.

This
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book takes the form of a memoir written by an aging man, an art historian looking back at his life, that of his best friend, an artist, the women they loved and their children. Hustvedt's ability to inhabit his mind is uncanny, and her characters are all fully realised, interesting and sympathetic.

Like another of my favourite writers, A.S. Byatt, Hustvedt has the ability to pack many disparate and sopisticated ideas into a story while retaining suspense and readability.
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LibraryThing member DrFuriosa
A complex and winding story about art, love, loss, and madness.

Language

Original language

English

ISBN

0340830727 / 9780340830727

Physical description

384 p.; 4.61 inches

Pages

384

Rating

½ (658 ratings; 4)
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