TITLE: The Painter
AUTHOR: Peter Heller
GENRE: Fiction, Literary
PUBLISHED: May 6, 2014
RATING: ★ ★ ★ ★
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon.com
MOBILISM LINK: Mobilism
Description: Peter Heller, the celebrated author of the breakout best seller The Dog Stars, returns with an achingly beautiful, wildly suspenseful second novel about an artist trying to outrun his past. Jim Stegner has seen his share of violence and loss. Years ago he shot a man in a bar. His marriage disintegrated. He grieved the one thing he loved. In the wake of tragedy, Jim, a well-known expressionist painter, abandoned the art scene of Santa Fe to start fresh in the valleys of rural Colorado. Now he spends his days painting and fly-fishing, trying to find a way to live with the dark impulses that sometimes overtake him. He works with a lovely model. His paintings fetch excellent prices. But one afternoon, on a dirt road, Jim comes across a man beating a small horse, and a brutal encounter rips his quiet life wide open. Fleeing Colorado, chased by men set on retribution, Jim returns to New Mexico, tormented by his own relentless conscience.
A stunning, savage novel of art and violence, love and grief, The Painter is the story of a man who longs to transcend the shadows in his heart, a man intent on using the losses he has suffered to create a meaningful life.
Review: I cannot talk about The Painter without first addressing my love of Peter Heller's first book, the post-apocalyptic novel, The Dog Stars. Not only did it have a better cover, a better title, and a better plot, but it had a better protagonist.
I adored Hig, the main character of The Dog Stars. Hig, while definitely all man, showed sensitivity: he craved connection with others, he forged an alliance with Bangley, his surly neighbor, he loved his dog. I grew to love him and felt I understood him. But then again Hig was easy to love.
Alas, in Heller's new book, The Painter, the main character is not easy to love. In fact, he is a bit of an ass. Jim, a divorcee, speaks disparagingly of his first wife and dismissively of other women who happen to cross his path. He does seem to show some sort of fondness for his new muse/girlfriend, and for his old friend-with-benefits, so that brought me some hope re his character. And he certainly pines over his dead teenage daughter, to the point that he often hallucinates he is fly fishing with her late at night, so he's not all bad.
Jim talks about his love for his daughter and how he misses her:
I painted that. The first and only good picture I made in the year after (she died). She and I over that canyon, ospreys. Carrying our rods, the fish teeming below us. I stood with Irmina and watched my daughter Alice fish into real dark. Past when we would have ever fished. Watched her fish until even her imagined shadow was swallowed by the night and the rush of water.
Good night beautiful. Fish on.
What got to me was the thought that maybe she did not want to fish on, into the full darkness alone. That she was tired and alone and cold but didn’t know what else to do. That she couldn’t stand for us to leave. That I couldn’t bear.
Obviously he truly loved at least one woman. After reading this section, a spark of fondness for Jim began to grow inside me. But Jim is a regular guy, far from perfect. While reading I often thought that Jim (and probably author Heller) want you to know that they are both very manly. Heller writes about things that are important to men: getting laid in the manliest way possible, cigars, flying planes, things like war, explosives, getting in fights and fly fishing. And even when he writes about potentially iffy things like painting portraits, he sprinkles some machismo into the mix. For example he'll get a blowjob, toss back a whiskey, or get in a fight before he picks up his paintbrush. Or if he does paint a beautiful painting, he will add a little "eff you" to the job somehow by taking too long to finish it, abandoning it halfway, or not taking his agent's calls afterward for week.
Then Jim talked about his second wife:
"I divorced Maggie just over a year and a half ago, part of the reason I moved up here. She was a wholesome Minnesota redhead who had once been a Playboy bunny, very by the book in all things. We got along, moved back to Taos together, and I wondered fifty times a week why I married her. Like when I came back from fishing and found my studio cleaned up, the canvases in progress set in order along one wall according to her estimate of their chronology, my paints, which tubes I leave scattered over a giant walnut table we inherited with the house, all laid in a row according to the Koala Paints color chart. The chart she left square on the table also in case I needed refreshing.
Coming to the Valley and living by myself for the first time in two decades, and letting the ache for a woman settle on my memories like a fine mist, greening them too, I realized that I hadn’t loved Maggie, not once. Isn’t that strange? To be able to feel so much tenderness for a person, and I did, and powerful attraction, sometimes, and yet feel no love. It seems cruel, almost monstrous. I mean I can love a bug. I have watched a spider weaving her web in the evening, in the young alder branches along the river, and I have loved her. Truly. Or a small moth trying to beat her way off the water of a dark pool, her soaked wings stuck to the surface as if by glue. And gently slid a leaf beneath her and lifted her to the ground, praying that her wings would dry without damage. I’ve done that. And yet I could not love my wife. Not that wife. As many knitted wool hats and back rubs later."
Wait, what? See what I mean? He loved a spider. And, he loves an abused horse. But not his wife. Oh, now I really disliked this guy.
But so what? Of course we don't have to like a novel's protagonist to enjoy the story itself, just care about what happens to him and feel some understanding of what makes him tick. Otherwise, why keep reading? For example, recently I read a novel called The Enchanted by Rene Denfeld. This female author got into the mind of these dangerous men so skillfully, then somehow explained their backstory so thoroughly and gently that I ended up understanding those characters who had committed horrible violent crimes. Another example: I read a memoir called Tiger, Tiger by Margaux Fragoso who made me feel nothing but pity and tenderness for a 50 yr old man who molested a 7 yr old girl - and the person writing the memoir was that selfsame 7 yr old girl, now grown. What a talent. Unfortunately, that talent seems to have escaped Peter Heller in The Painter. I disliked Jim, but more importantly, I did not understand his motivations, nor did I end up caring much about Jim by the end of the book. There was no growth or resolution for Jim's character at the end of the book, nothing much had changed, he kept stumbling along, getting drunk, being an asshole, punching people and treating women in the same half-hearted and careless way he always did. In fact, the only woman he truly seemed to care about was his daughter - and she was dead.
Oh, but wait! The best part of the book was the last chapter. After enduring Jim for the entire book, including a particular violent senseless act that started a hot mess with all sorts of people coming after him for revenge, Jim finally gets what is coming to him. I actually pumped my hand in the air and hissed, "Yessssssss!" when I read the last few pages. So maybe that was Heller's message after all? That Jim was not a great guy and he finally got what he deserved. If that was the message, I'm only sorry I had to wait till the last page to see Jim go down. The ending came so quickly it was as though Heller's editor told him to "wrap it up" - the resolution of the novel actually came on its final two pages. I actually would have liked at least one more chapter to watch Jim squirm a bit. Wait I've realized too late - maybe I did care about what happened to Jim after all - as long as it was bad!
Aside from my complaints about Jim, Heller's writing is absolutely stellar. This is quality literary fiction, and Heller knows his stuff: he holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in both fiction and poetry - and it shows. There are many references to great works of art, poetry, and literature. Jim talks about some of the poetry he's read:
He (Jim's friend) was big into Pablo Neruda and Rilke. I read some of them. Seemed like very different guys, to me, what do I know. Neruda making little doves out of his lover’s hands and wheat fields out of her stomach and stretching out like a root in the dark, he made me horny he really did. Made me want to find a Latin lover, Spanish or Chilean, not too young, one with hips and eyelashes and a voice like dusk rubbing over a calm water. Read enough Neruda you can’t stop.
Rilke on the other hand did not make me horny at all. He walked around like a man who had been skinned alive, didn’t know what to do with all those acute impressions and so made his poems.
This book can be enjoyed solely on the merit of the writing. But at the end I was a little sad. I was so looking forward to getting to know another character created by Heller. Even thought the end of the book was fabulous, after I closed the book I just missed Hig all the more.
Four stars. (Three stars for story, plus one for the writing and for that ending!)
