Siri Hustvedt

An unusual work, and difficult to review. The protagonist is a 50-something poet who has been left by her husband of 30 years, and has a psychotic break. The novel picks up as she is recovering, and has gone back to her old hometown to spend the summer and get back together. The work trails through art, literature, poetry, and biology, with a lot of feminism to focus the work. The characters are strangely, oddly disengaged. The protagonist, even when subject to crying bouts, seems to be show more detached from the world she inhabits, moving through it as a ghost or spectator that occasionally finds herself drawn into the strange, all too real world of the natives. Between the teenage girls and their catty meanness, and the old ladies with their gracious charm, and a young neighbor couple with a rocky marriage, she richochets without direction or meaning, mostly trying to keep up. The work will bring back difficult memories for many middle-aged women who have experienced some of the same emotions, and corporeal situations, described in this work. The ending is not unexpected, but not known far in advance, either, and it resists the urge to clean up the messy, chaotic world the narrator inhabits. Disturbing, familiar, and a strong look at the rich world inhabited by middle-aged women (something sadly lacking in most literature). show less

I am late to the party with this novel; I am sorry I waited so long to read this ~2003 critically acclaimed novel about friendship, tragedy, grief, duplicity and how easy it is for everything you've ever loved to slip away. Our narrator is a middle age art historian who befriends an enigmatic young author; they both marry and have sons at about the same time and their families are pleasantly intertwined. Through divorces, deaths, fortune, fame and aging we follow their friendships to the show more end. Although my description sounds perhaps like a hokey family drama - this was much more than that. I was hooked immediately and stayed up late every evening reading this compelling story and was heartbroken at its conclusion.

Alot of the book does focus on art. What makes something art; the art scene in Manhattan in the 1980's; complicated descriptions of the fictional modern works of art in the story. In fact, all of the protagonists are artists or writers and we are privy to rather detailed descriptions of their scholarly or artistic endeavors. For the most part, this added gravitas and interest to the novel and really fleshed out the characters. I did however find myself a bit bored with William Weschler's cubes. Enough already. Really though, this was just a tiny criticism of an otherwise brilliant novel.

Hustvedt's prose is elegant and poignant. Her characters alive with all their flaws, eccentricities, gestures. I loved Mr. Bob's blessings; Matthew's drawings; Leo's drawer of keepsakes; the Legos the raver teens carried around with them. I cried out loud at certain parts and I am not typically one who does that. I was perhaps a tiny bit disappointed by the end. I expected maybe one more closing event with Mark, or Lucille - some secret or some hidden event to surface. I felt as if the narrative foreshadowed something it never revealed, or maybe I just missed it. But I do think aesthetically the ending worked, although it left this reader wanting more.

Highly recommended for lovers of literary fiction; good story-telling & dramatic tension coupled with a lot to say about love, art, and life and our tenuous hold on it all. show less

A collection of Hustvedt's shorter writings from the last five years or so, written against the background of Trump, Covid, and the deaths of her parents. There are several essays about her parents and grandparents that fill in some extra pieces around the people she wrote about in her novel The sorrows of an American; there are analytical pieces about Jane Austen, Emily Brontë and Louise Bourgeois; a playful reworking of Sinbad's voyages and a two-hour stare at a Bellini painting in the show more Frick Collection; and there are reflections on death-practices, on mentoring, on misogyny, and on the absence of representations of childbirth in Western art.

As you would expect, it's all calm, clear and devastatingly logical, with more than a hint of a twinkle in the author's eye as she points out the inanities of what earlier writers have said about a given subject. She especially castigates critics who apply the teachings of Freud uncritically in inappropriate places, notably in her essay on Louise Bourgeois, where she clearly feels that people have taken the artist's own statements far too literally, as though a woman artist wasn't capable of using irony or leading critics up the garden path. Calling Hustvedt "a twenty-first century Virginia Woolf", as one of the blurbers on the back cover does, is maybe a bit overblown, but that's certainly the kind of space she's operating in. show less

I saw that Siri Hustvedt wrote a collection of essays about perception and identity, and I think there must be a great deal of her thinking expressed by the protagonist of this novel, Harriet “Harry” Burden. Harry is an artist in New York, who also had the possible misfortune of being married to a well-known art dealer. Her husband, Felix, has refused to show her work, and consequently the New York art world knows her as the hostess of Felix’s dinner parties rather than as an artist in show more her own right. Both Felix and Harry are dead at the start of the novel, which is told through Harry’s journals, academic and critical writing about her, and interviews with people who knew her.

After Felix’s death, Harry undertakes a project to create and show her art using “masks”—three male artists who will show the art as if it were their own. Not only are these shows far better received than Harry’s art was when shown under her own name, vindicating her belief that she has been disregarded as an artist because she is a woman, but it gives Harry (and us) insight into how what we think and believe affects how we perceive and, perhaps even more interestingly, how her “masks” affect the art she creates.

It’s clear from the onset of the novel that the art market has difficulty believing that Harry was really the creator of the projects shown under the names of her male “masks.” Rune, the final of her “masks” who was already an established artist in his own right, refuses after all to reveal that Harry was the artist behind the work. Her relationship with him is the most complex and thought-provoking in the book, though her relationships with every character shed light on the philosophical and psychological concerns about art, perception, sex, and identity that infuse the novel.

This is very much an intellectual novel of ideas. There’s a touch of “Rashomon,” in that we see Harry’s life and work from a variety of perspectives, though strictly speaking not many of the same individual incidents from different points of view. We see the broader picture of Harry as housewife, mother, virago, mentally disturbed obsessive, lover, and ultimately brilliant artist.

The title comes from the writing of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, a 17th-century philosopher and writer, and an icon to Harry. The title became particularly resonant at the very end of the novel, when we see Harry’s magnum opus through the eyes of the distinctly unintellectual Sweet Autumn, a New Age crystal healer. This final scene made the perfect frame, and there’s nothing I appreciate more than the perfect ending to a novel of ideas. show less