Tuesday, June 12, 2018

Review: The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked this novel up in hopes it would be reminiscent of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, another novel about a centuries-old painting and the effect it has on some contemporary lives. Where Tartt’s masterpiece is written on a Dickensian scale, giving us characters from trailer parks alongside characters from the New York elite, this one works toward a broader historical scope, mapping a pair – or maybe a triptych – of unhappy love stories across the 1630s, 1950s, and 2000s.

The abiding concern throughout this seems to be with an exploration of “forgery.” That’s true in its concern with paintings and their copies, but maybe even more so with the ways people pretend to certain roles within a relationship. When we first meet Marty DeGroot, he’s a not-quite-satisfied New York patent attorney who seems to have it all. When the painting he’s inherited from several antecedent generations gets stolen, though, he discovers the extent to which he’s been shamming happiness. He comes alive when it’s his responsibility to recover the painting, and he’s more authentic seeming as a lover when he adopts an alias to seduce Ellie, whom he discovers is part of the plot.

In turn, Ellie is unsatisfied with her work as an art history grad student until she has the opportunity to make a near-perfect copy of the painting. She too comes alive, more authentically, once she is involved with the fake. For the only time in her life, she is a real artist, a real artist engaged in the work of forgery.

And, in the other story, Sara first paints her work as a substitution for the real joy of her dead daughter. Even her original, that is, is a sham of the experience that inspired it.

I like the ambition such a series of inquiries implies, and I’m not troubled by the fact that Smith never quite resolves them. I am a bit troubled, though, by the clinical tone of much of this. I admire this at a technical level, but I just couldn’t quite embrace each of the separate stores with the intensity I wanted. It’s as if those underlying questions attenuate the stories they make possible – everyone is experiencing something that’s a type of forgery, a semblance that falls short of the authentic. [SPOILER] Each of our three protagonists finds a measure of true happiness at the end, but Smith gives that happiness only cursory attention: Marty makes a kind of amends for being a bastard, Ellie finds a new scholarly passion when she determines to uncover Sara’s last days, and Sara finds a kind of peace with a non-artist who loves her. It’s as if the point of this is that we can never approach the authentic until it’s too late.

I wish I could be more specific about how this falls short in such ways. All I know for certain is that, after listening a while, I’d find myself no longer enthralled. Smith writes beautifully, and I admire each scene, but I feel as if the central conceit of falsification simply deadens the effect of the story itself. I love the opening section here, where we see Marty in his unfulfilled life, but then I feel as if each time we revisit him we’re starting over. The different scenes simply carry less weight as they reintroduce us to the characters. It’s always interesting, but we seem always to be called on question what we think we know about them.

I don’t want to sound too cranky with all of that. I enjoyed the novel thematically, and, more than that, I admire its form.

Like a lot of novels I admire – like at least one I dream of writing myself – this is a broken narrative, one that calls on us to assemble a whole from its fragments. As a reader, I’m charged then with making meaning from these parts, and I love that challenge. There are writers who do that especially well across a contemporary swath – what I call the Dickensian scope. Tartt, of course can be great at it, but I think as well of Colum McCann and Jennifer Egan who also give a good range of the world of their own time. My own ambition – and I think it’s Smith’s as well – is to do that across time, to let these different pieces imply a history so vast that no single person’s perspective is enough to take it in. My hero and model for that is Mordecai Richler.

Smith doesn’t resolve this with the easy conclusion he might have selected, a conclusion in which our contemporary characters find happiness in discovering the lost happiness of those who came before. On the other hand, he ends this with sufficient parallels that it feels as if that’s the lesson we’re supposed to take from it ourselves.

As a bottom line, then, I admire the ambition and the technique here, and there are many passages I admire. I wish, though, it found some way to come together more effectively as a whole.


View all my reviews

No comments:

Post a Comment