At the recent Crime and Justice Festival, the view was put forward persuasively that all novels are to an extent crime novels. Here’s an example: What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt (2003), though never found on the crime shelves at your local bookshop, is a sophisticated urban thriller that for the first hundred pages doesn’t appear to be a thriller at all.
Hustvedt spends the first third of her book taking us through a decade in the life of her characters, who are artists and intellectuals in New York. The narrator Leo is an art historian – one of the marvels of the book is Hustvedt’s perfectly sustained rendition of his voice over thirty years of his life. His friend Bill is an experimental artist, whose work at various stages of his career is described at length (sometimes too much so – describing art works in words is always a hazardous undertaking). Bill’s wife Lucille is a neurotic poet; his model, and later his lover Violet, a sociologist fascinated by hysteria and eating disorders. Leo’s partner Erica is a literature academic. Both couples have sons, who become close friends. Bill falls for Violet, and leaves Lucille; returns to his wife and son for an excruciating five days; then leaves them for good.
How far you buy into this first section depends on how much you can bear the conversation of New York intellectuals. Lucille describes a dinner she has cooked as “Flageolets aux legumes. But the legumes appear to be travelling incognito … I don’t understand what it is about recipes … I am always worrying about the verbs.” “Her verbs are terrific,” Bill replies loyally. The pretensions of the insufferable Lucille are countered by the unconventional behavior of Dan, Bill’s schizophrenic brother, who turns up at family dinners to pace up and down, chain smoke, make strange gestures and engage in obsessive wordplay: “My big bro, Big Bill, old B.B., the Big Boom Bill …”
The second section begins with a death, which changes everything. Leo and Erica’s relationship gradually disintegrates. Strange events, minor but inexplicable, begin to occur; one of the characters appears to be a sociopathic liar. A sinister conceptual artist appears on the scene, Teddy Giles, whose speciality is creating murder scenes with dismembered models, nooses and blood. His work is hailed by critics as “brilliant” “riveting” and “astounding” – but art world gossip has Giles a psycho involved in real murders. One of the characters is drawn into his orbit and Leo, by now a man in late middle age, attempts to track them down and find out the truth.
The complications of the crime plot are matched by the emotional plot. As Leo tries to rescue what he can of his marriage to Erica, he simultaneously falls in love with Violet, partner of his best friend. Leo has been psychologically battered by the events of the previous decades – what follows takes him, and others, to the edge of what is bearable. Hustvedt has her plots on a slow burn, building to a climax that is first shocking, then moving – both of these feats being difficult to achieve, the second much more so.
I found the characters convincing, especially their bewilderment as they try to make sense of sociopathic behavior. These experts at interpretation, used to analyzing everything they see and feel – Leo is the author of a book titled A Brief History of Seeing in Western Painting – are constantly confused and duped. Leo ends up a lonely old man, with failing sight, having lost the people he loved. But for all that, the ending is not all dark – there is still friendship, loyalty, kindness, and the memories of love.
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