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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)
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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.
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.
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
[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.
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.
Questions of identity. love, loss and
Thanks to Leanne for the recommendation; I'll certainly seek out more of Hustvedt's work.
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
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.
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.
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.
I found the detailed descriptions of the artworks and Violet's hysteria thesis tedious in the extreme. Why do authors insist on
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.
This
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.