Beauty and cruelty, cohabiting

Also, Moments in Modernism at the AGO

I’ve been a fan of Siri Hustvedt ever since I read The Blazing World and whenever I hear her in interviews, she doesn’t disappoint. The other day I finished what is probably her best known novel, What I Loved (2003) and am only now caught up with the controversy that swirled around it at the time of publication.

You could attempt to read this erudite and psychologically sophisticated novel as its own thing and ignore the RL complications. The very Iris-Murdochian tale follows the friendship of two couples in New York City from the 1970s to the 1990s: a gifted painter and his feminist academic wife, and an art historian with his academic wife. I know how it all sounds—again with the problems of the laptop classes in NYC, that criminally underrepresented demographic in anglophone fiction—but Hustvedt gives these characters the breadth of her own knowledge and interests and the first half of the book, as the two pairs are beginning to forge their way in life, is about so much more than who beds who and who is up for tenure.

The painter is trying to make it in an art world that happens to favour the abstract, the minimalist and the shock value at that point in history—it’s the NYC art scene of Rauschenberg, Rothko, Warhol, Jasper Johns and our protagonist is starting off as a figurative painter who depicts adults and children in surreal or dreamscape settings. Over the years, he moves on to making the boxes with figures, which become larger boxes, with more figures and effects, his created worlds complexifying as he finally begins to experiment with video. (I was thinking which actual artistic career he might be echoing and it’s probably Louise Bourgeois.) His second and permanent partner is a charismatic academic researching Charcot’s, Breuer’s and Freud’s hysteric patients, their latter day sisters the anorexics and the bulimics, and that whole busy conjunction of distress, the idioms available for it to be expressed, and social contagion and mimesis. She is the only non-Jew in the foursome, and like Hustvedt herself, a Norwegian-American from Minnesota.

The narrator too shares some of Hustvedt’s interests and expertise: he specializes in history of art. His psyche and his principal relationships are conveyed through his exploration of art, not least the work of his best friend. The two couples end up living in the same building and spending summers in the same rented house on the east coast. In due course, each couple gets a son, and the two boys grow up together with four loving adults by their side. The differences in personality slowly emerge: the narrator’s boy is the one displaying an artistic sensibility.

The one discordant tone of those golden years is the painter’s first wife, an arid poetess who is appalled to find herself a mother. While the storyline moves her to another city for an academic appointment and remarries her, she keeps joint custody with her ex and the boy travels between the households, though, the novel suggests, only the painter’s is the truly attentive and engaged one.

Now to the change of key in the novel as tragedy strikes: the narrator’s son dies in a freak accident. The primary couple, mad with grief, loses the capacity to hold their marriage together and the narrator’s wife—somewhat underwritten anyway—moves to the west coast (for an academic appointment, naturally) while our storyteller gradually becomes an adjunct “Uncle Leo” to his best friend’s family and their son. The teen, though, is beginning to behave strangely.

It’s here that real life becomes impossible to tuck away from the novel. Hustvedt’s husband was Paul Auster (1947-2024), whose son by his first wife Lydia Davis died of heroin overdose in 2022. Daniel Auster was in the news multiple times in the course of his 44 years. The year before his death, he was convicted of manslaughter after his baby daughter died on his watch, and many years before he was known as the young man who was present when two of his friends murdered and quartered a dealer and then continued to party. (The body was later dumped in the river. There is a movie about the whole horrid affair called Party Monster, which came out around the same time as What I Loved.) In his good years, Auster Jr. was trying to make it as a photographer. Following the news of his death, the NYT ran a long-read about his life that suggested, among many other things, that based on available evidence, he got along well with Lydia Davis and that she was, to use the Winnicottian term, a ‘good enough’ mother that any child would welcome having. Unlike Auster himself, she apparently never put her children in her fiction, out of respect for their privacy.

Maybe I’m focusing on Davis because I had read her and liked her work before either Hustvedt or Auster. She is an extraordinary writer. It was a shock to discover that the character of “Lucille”, the arid, humourless, sexless poetess, is supposed to be a version of Auster’s first wife. The novel is only emotionally autobiographical, is all Hustvedt’s ever said about What I Loved. The rest would not be discussed. But others have tried: a NY Observer columnist read the novel for autobiographical cues and found it indiscreet, maybe even exploitative. (Katie Roiphe responded with a defense of Hustvedt’s right to use her own family as material, including her husband’s son from another marriage. Is she not allowed because she’s a woman, she asked, taking the not particularly useful gender angle there.)

But I should say more about the character of the wayward child in What I Loved. The last third of the book switches registers and becomes a slow-burn suspense novel about a much loved and cared for boy turning into a lying, stealing party brat and drug addicted teen and young adult. It is very very hard to read it without wondering what might have led Hustvedt to create such a bleak fictional equivalent of her stepson that doesn’t have a single redeeming feature. The boy is corrupt through and through. It’s a “characterological problem”, his therapist suggests in one scene, as in one’s character being one’s destiny. People like this, she says, “either end up in prison or die.” Memories later in the novel emerge of his odd behaviour already as a child, hints of future lying and stealing. By the end, you are inclined to think that there was an acorn of evil in this child from the get-go — that he was a demon in search of a vice, a mind hungry for destruction. Drugs, this being NYC of the 1980s and a well-off family, were the handiest device available.

Worse, his mother’s inadequate love must have had something to do with it too. “She can’t love him, even if she wanted to give it her best try” was the final verdict on Lucille by… the painter’s brilliant current and forever wife.

Have you ever felt dirty after reading a novel? I can’t fend off the feeling that I’ve witnessed something unseemly while also absolutely loving the novel as a punter: it is an “intellectual page-turner”, as the critics have described it two decades ago. But what bottom of despair must a step-parent (and wife) reach to resort to creating this kind of a character? There are precedents, I realize. No, not Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin; Shriver is not a parent. Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child.

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Moments in Modernism at the AGO

Mark Rothko. No.1, White and Red (1962)

‘Moments in Modernism’ which opened last week on the top floor of the AGO covers exactly the period in which the painter of What I Loved is trying to make it in NYC. The focus is on NYC in the 1960s and 1970s, and “the echoes around the world” of this specifically New York modernist moment. There are two Rauschenbergs on display, a Warhol, a Rothko, an Ellsworth Kelly and an Agnes Martin, neither of which, I’m afraid, touched me particularly. What was worth the trip though was the Alex Colville room and the Gerhard Richter room, as well as discovering a completely new-to-me Canadian abstract modernist, Rita Latendre.

The Colville room contains an unexpected number of female nudes, with one of them, Woman on Wharf, unlike anything else in this genre (except perhaps Courbet’s The Origin of the World). The Richter room contains, among others, two image-explosions of his abstract colour phase, the texture of one of them visibly shaped with a squeegee, and his famous oil painting of a woman that looks like a yellowed out-of-focus black-and-white photograph, Helga Matura.

Woman in Bathtub (1973) by Alex Colville

Downstairs on the second floor of the AGO, another exhibit worth a visit: Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe 1400-1800. Two more weeks before it closes on July 1; I was hoping to write about it but would have to go back and see it again. The AGO Annual Pass costs more this year, $40 a pop, and so does its single adult entry at $30. The under-25s still go in for free.