This book is written in the first person and involves no dialog between the characters, instead relying on a combination of the narrator's monologue, responses to "anticipated" questions on the part of the other person, and narrator's recollections in order to move the plot forward. It sounds weird but is fun to read. ( )

Unusual. Intriguing. I usually don’t care for first person narrators, but this was acceptable. No surprises, but an interesting story. ( )

A subtle little psychological study of an artist and his subject, an old "friend" and art critic, with a surprising twist at the end. A little bit like Possession—but not so sophisticated and quite a bit darker. ( )

The sense of being inside the artist's head was very effective. Reliving his whole life through his memories and musings was fascinating. Slowly understanding the evolving relationship with his sitter was handled in a very gripping and ultimately menacing way. The relationships with the female characters in the story were all quite troubling. They are portrayed as suspicious and untrustworthy even through the unwilling attraction to them - they really seem to be perceived as largely objects. When they turn out to have strengths, talents, desires, fears and passions beyond the artist's comprehension, they become almost evil - quite disturbing.

Even in Pears’s talented hands, this author indulgence just didn’t work for me. I persisted in reading the whole book (which is all of 211 pages) because I was waiting for a payoff that was too late and too lenient to be effective. Oh sure, it’s there, but you have to wade through a lot of Artistic Opinion to get to it. And it’s oblique when delivered. Horrible, but unrealized and in future tense. You’re left to wonder if Henry managed to follow through. I hope he did.

William is a thoroughly despicable character as painted by our narrator who delivers the whole of the text in a 2nd person monologue aimed squarely at William. Like other books written with a narrow point-of-view, its limitations come up hard against the narrative. It isn’t as difficult to bear with this book because I think Pears was very deliberate in his decision to address the whole book to “you”. You being the reader, but also William. The thing is, he has to balance what William would know and what you do as reader. Of course readers know less and have to infer a lot from the text. Once I got past the difficulty in reading this delivery (I recently DNFed another book for exactly this type of narrative) I started to wonder why Pears chose it. How does this serve the story in a way other more common styles don’t? All I can think of is the anticipatory frisson of coming bad news. Putting yourself into William’s position does add a bit of that, but it’s hard won and requires a lot of mental discipline on the part of the reader, something I failed at over and over. I just couldn’t put myself in William’s place. Why was he putting up with this monologue? Why was he there? Why couldn’t he leave? It drove me nuts and I had to continually re-focus on the text and story.

That said, there are some great lines in this book about art, popularity, integrity and the role of the critic. Pears can write and he definitely is passionate about art, its closeted sphere and its larger role in culture. How it is rarely viewed objectively. There are gems in there. On page 72-75 or so he gives us a fantastic scene of palpable cruelty which kept me reading. William needed to suffer for what he did. There are similar scenes later in the book, but they didn’t ratchet up the way I thought and so the ultimate tragedies they cause were blunted for me. I expected one of the two, but the other wasn’t sufficiently horrifying because the victim was too remote. It was too abstract.

Maybe that was the point. I think there were a lot of things (points) that I didn’t catch in this book and will probably have to give it ago in another ten years or so. ( )