Available Light

When my 14-year-old daughter decided it was time to put away the pinks and princess tones of her youth, and decorate her bedroom with the newfound sophistication of adolescence, the first picture she hung on her walls was a poster from the Mauritshuis in The Hague of “Girl With a Pearl Earring.” The painting is one of only 35 by the 17th century Jan Vermeer that have survived the 350 years since their conceptions in the Dutch port of Delft. Like all Vermeer portraits, it is a model of clarity and light and beauty. Against a black background, the painter has captured a close-up of a young girl (is she 12? is she 22?) in shades of gold, from the shoulder over which she turns her face back to the painter to the crown of cloth that falls like a ponytail. The only punctuations are a band of blue above the brow, an open-mouthed question mark of rouge and the famous pearl that hangs from the girl’s left ear, catching a wintry light from off-canvas.

That magical light may be the aide-memoire by which Sunday afternoon museum browsers and high school art history students know their Vermeer. But it is the gaze of “Pearl” (as my daughter has dubbed her), the mixture of shy obedience in her eyes and worldly doubt in her open mouth, that transforms our interest in aesthetics into questions about character. Who is this girl? What will she do with her life?

The Anglo American writer Tracy Chevalier has chosen to answer these questions in her second novel, “Girl With a Pearl Earring.” The girl is named Griet. She is the eldest daughter of a middle-class artisan, a tile maker--this being Delft, after all--who has lost his sight in a kiln explosion. With the son of the family indentured as an apprentice, it is the 16-year-old Griet who must earn the daily bread. The descent into service is a blow to the dignity of the family. But as fortune has it, a prospective employer with an eye for vegetables happens into her mother’s kitchen one morning and addresses the young girl.

“ ‘I see you have separated the whites,’ he said, indicating the turnips and onions. ‘And then the orange and the purple, they do not sit together. Why is that?’ He picked up a shred of cabbage and a piece of carrot and shook them like dice in his hand.

“ ‘The colors fight when they are side by side, sir.’ ”

Griet wins the audition, of course, and immediately moves in with the Vermeers. It’s a chaotic household she finds on Delft’s Papist Corner, run more by Vermeer’s mother-in-law, Maria Thins, than his spoiled, ever-pregnant wife, Catherina. A host of religious paintings (that make the simple, Protestant Griet uncomfortable in the Catholic setting), a gaggle of children and a goose of a cook complete the menage. But Griet’s routine of washing and shopping is improved by her major task: cleaning the master’s studio without altering the placement of a single object. Using her fingers, hands and arms as measuring sticks, Griet proves to have an eye for proportion as well as color. And sure enough, it is Griet’s elbow grease that polishes the window panes to let in the famous Vermeer light.

Griet grows through her next two years in service. The plague comes to Delft and makes her separation from her family harder to bear. And Pieter, the handsome son of the butcher, pays her attentions that would gladden the heart of many a lass in her situation, with a family that could use a bit of meat. But Griet has also grown into a secret life upstairs in her master’s studio. With the connivance of Maria Thins, who sees that with Griet’s aid, her son-in-law can finish more than one painting a season, Griet graduates first into Vermeer’s assistant and eventually into his model. In Chevalier’s final conceit, Griet also becomes his most perceptive critic.

Vermeer’s own world is sketched only briefly in the lightest of chalks. Although Griet must deal with Vermeer’s historical acquaintances--fending off advances by his lecherous patron Van Ruiven and following the advice of his sympathetic friend, Van Leeuwenhoek, the famous maker of microscopes--her environs are defined by domestic necessity. Yet readers in search of Vermeer and the meaning of light are not going to find artist fictions here of the shades of the Gauguin-inspired “The Moon and Sixpence” or the Michelangelic “The Agony and the Ecstasy.” The portrait, after all, is not of the master but the maid. And although Griet might solve Vermeer’s problems of composition and reflection, she is only reflecting the light of a greater sphere.

While the mind and genius of Vermeer remain veiled, the secret to “Girl With a Pearl Earring’s” complex look is revealed. Chevalier writes Griet in the voice of a simple, prim and relatively humorless art history major. Illiterate and unschooled as she may be, Griet appreciates the intensity of light and the softness of imperfection with the satisfaction of a 21st century Sunday afternoon museum browser or high school student. She looks across 3 1/2 centuries to us, frozen in the adolescent belief that beauty is truth and vice-versa.

But behind the canvas are several layers of teenage foundation. Colors of pragmatism fight colors of idealism: Should she marry the butcher’s son or should she model for the painter? In the end, the adventures of Griet may be most interesting to the 14-year-old girls who seek life lessons from the weekly travails of the collegiate “Felicity” on the cathode-ray canvas.