A picture that tells a story

Can it be said that anyone is sane, that anyone is healthy – or does all life consist of degrees of illness and madness? Is love a kind of madness? Is grief an illness? Is art whatever we say it is, or are there limits? Can murder be art? These and many other questions hover around Siri Hustvedt’s third novel, a compassionate and gripping drama.

The novel tells the story of Leo Hertzberg, an art historian at Columbia University whose life is changed when he buys a painting by Bill Wechsler and is drawn into the contemporary New York art scene. As he and Bill become friends, their histories are inextricably entwined, their personal and professional preoccupations mirroring each other in an interlocking story of family intimacies, tragedy and alienation that spreads across more than 20 years.

It is a tale played out against a subtly disquieting background of illness, oddity, and mental disorder which, through the figure of Bill’s son, Mark, gradually comes to dominate Leo’s life. There is nothing crudely linear about the process, but as his academic interests shift from the lucid world of Piero della Francesca to the horrors of Goya’s black art, so the certainties of human relations are tested in a struggle for Mark’s soul.

As with any decent novel, the strengths of this one lie in the characterisation and control of plot, beautifully sustained through the darkening middle section of the work and into its bleak finale. At the core is a celebration of love and friendship, but at the book’s end Leo is left with nothing, a moral man stranded by loss and betrayal in a world whose moral ambiguities are brilliantly enshrined in the Sporus-like creation of Teddy Giles.