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(3.76) | 79 | "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. Years ago, a well-known expressionist painter named Jim Stegner shot a man in a bar. The man lived, Jim served his time, and he has learned to live with the dark impulses that sometimes overtake him. Jim enjoys a quiet life in the valleys of Colorado. He works with a lovely model, he doesn't drink, he goes fly fishing in the evenings. His paintings fetch excellent prices at a posh gallery in Santa Fe. He is--if he can admit it--almost happy. One day, driving down a dirt road, Jim sees a man beating a small horse. Jim leaps out of the truck, tackles the man, and bloodies his nose. The man is Dell, a cruel hunting outfitter notorious among locals. Jim cannot shake his rage over the little horse. The next night, under a full moon, telling himself he is just going night fishing, he returns to the creek where Dell has his camp and kills him. As Jim tries to come to terms with what he has done, he must evade the police, navigate his own conscience, and escape the members of Dell's clan set on revenge. And he paints the whole time; trying to make sense of his actions. Traveling from the rough adobe cottages and rivers of Colorado to the bright streets and galleries of Santa Fe, aching with grief and transcendent with beauty, The Painter is a story about art and love and violence, and using the remnants of hardship to create a rich life"--
"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"--… (more) |
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To all the artists in my family
And to Jim Wagner and Nancy Carter
And Kim  | |
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I never imagined I would shoot a man. | |
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Nestled down in all this high rough country like a train set. Sofia pulls up in the Subaru she calls Triceratops. It's that old. I can hear the rusted out muffler up on the county road, caterwauling like a Harley, hear the drop in tone as it turns down the steep gravel driveway. The downshift in the dip and dinosaur roar as it climbs again to the house. Makes every entrance very dramatic, which she is. "I'm young," she says. It's a simple statement, incontrovertible, and it stabs me with something like pain in the middle of my laughter. The afternoon is somber under cloud, then the edge tugs away and the water sparks in a sudden sweep of sunlight. I almost cannot contain–the rage and the tenderness together like a boiling weather front. Panic sounds like tearing paper. Threats are threats. Violence is violence. In my experience the two don't go together more than half the time. One reason I could spend so much time along up here, happily: could sit and absorb the two hours before dark every evening as if it were a pageant. I signed and leaned my head back and watched a long needled limb brush a scratchless sky. She tried hard to be forthright and friendly and she wore her hurt in a bewildered half smile. I think there should be a tribunals for social cruelty as there are for physical assault. Calculated cuts in the first degree. Snobicide or its reverse. And she was always so relieved at this attention, she split open like a milkweed and her laughter floated into my eyelashes. he shot himself with an engraved Italian sixteen gauge worth forty thousand dollars. Messy. Made a Jackson Pollock of his brains on his study wall. She was such a sweetheart. I thought she was going to say she wanted to cut his nuts off or put an ice pick through his ear. When the wind came through it spun the leaves like a million chimes, they ticked and turned their pale undersides back, so that the wind swept through with a brightening of the canopy, a wave of light that carried the sweet smell of dying leaves. For such a big man he moved pretty smoothly, a little like a parade float. His candor landed on my shoulder like a lost bird. The breeze blew leaves out of the few big cottonwoods and chased them up the street. What I realized standing there, is that this dark yearning is what happens when we idealize anything: the form of a woman, a landscape, a spiritual impulse. We move it closer to the realm of the dead, if not outright kill it. The washboards could loosen your teeth. She trembled all along her length, like a tree struck at its base by an axe. We pushed open the door, and I remembered that it smelled rich–smelled like wool Persians and fur throws and glove leather. Smelled like freedom, the freedom from financial worry I knew I would never have, the freedom to buy a twenty thousand dollar calfskin couch. I remember pulling the sliding balcony door wide and being carried by the sounds. She shook the ice to chime against the glass and toured the room, holding the drink with the nonchalance of a Gatsby flapper. For an hour we were a perfect family. "Is this what you want? Seriously. To drive me at last over the edge?"
"What edge? One you haven't been over already? Do you know what it's like trying to keep track of you and your edges?" | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English
None ▾Book descriptions "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. Years ago, a well-known expressionist painter named Jim Stegner shot a man in a bar. The man lived, Jim served his time, and he has learned to live with the dark impulses that sometimes overtake him. Jim enjoys a quiet life in the valleys of Colorado. He works with a lovely model, he doesn't drink, he goes fly fishing in the evenings. His paintings fetch excellent prices at a posh gallery in Santa Fe. He is--if he can admit it--almost happy. One day, driving down a dirt road, Jim sees a man beating a small horse. Jim leaps out of the truck, tackles the man, and bloodies his nose. The man is Dell, a cruel hunting outfitter notorious among locals. Jim cannot shake his rage over the little horse. The next night, under a full moon, telling himself he is just going night fishing, he returns to the creek where Dell has his camp and kills him. As Jim tries to come to terms with what he has done, he must evade the police, navigate his own conscience, and escape the members of Dell's clan set on revenge. And he paints the whole time; trying to make sense of his actions. Traveling from the rough adobe cottages and rivers of Colorado to the bright streets and galleries of Santa Fe, aching with grief and transcendent with beauty, The Painter is a story about art and love and violence, and using the remnants of hardship to create a rich life"--
"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"-- ▾Library descriptions No library descriptions found. ▾LibraryThing members' description |
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4
While the plot spins a bit out of control the writing was so good that I didn't care. I loved reading about the paintings and how people responded to them. I wish I could see them in real life and not just in my imagination.
Unlike anything else and a pleasure to read. (