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Loading... The American Painter Emma Dial: A Novelby Samantha Peale
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I just never connected with this book, although I wanted to. Emma got on my nerves severely. This may say more about me than it does about the book, though. ( ) I liked this very much. Not the story so much but the way it made me feel. Peale totally nails New York and all that can happen to you as you make your way through your thirties. How to commit, how to waste time, how to mature, how to grow up, and when are you too old to let yourself be treated like a piece of shit. Great book. I struggled off and on to finish this book, and thanks to a 6 hour flight delay - with 3 hours actually stuck in the plane on the tarmac - I had little choice but to plow through it. By the time the book ended (while still on the plane), I was finally enjoying it and felt like the character (Emma Dial) was taking shape...and then it ended. The first 200 pages or so rambled about art, the art market, art assistants, relationships, casual sex, jealousy, competition, New York living, you name it. And none of the topics reached a point. Once the waffling Emma finally makes some decisions, the book takes a new direction, Emma becomes interesting and I felt my investment in the book was going to pay off. and then, "The End". It wasn't a bad book, and what was developed was written fairly well, I just couldn't read more than a chapter at a time because I didn't care enough about any of the shallow characters which had been drawn thus far to do more. no reviews | add a review
Distinctions
Emma Dial is a virtuoso painter who executes the works of Michael Freiburg, a preeminent figure in the New York art world. She has a sensuous and exacting hand, hips like a matador, and long neglected ambitions of her own. She spends her days completing a series of pictures for Freiburg's spring exhibition and her nights drinking and dining with friends and luminaries. Into this landscape walks Philip Cleary, Emma's longtime painting hero and a colleague and rival of her boss. Philip Cleary represents the ideal artistic existence, a respected painter, fearless and undeterred by fashion. He is unmatched by anyone from Emma's generation. Except, just possibly, Emma herself. Emma Dial must choose between the security of being a studio assistant to a renowned painter and the unknown future as an artist in her own right. Samantha Peale writes with astonishing insight about a young woman who risks everything to fulfill her ambitions as an artist. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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