The art world, framed and reframed

What I Loved

A Novel

Siri Hustvedt

Henry Holt: 368 pp., $25

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Twenty-five years of the New York art world, with all of its hyperkinetic creativity, petty jealousies and dazzling degeneracy, is brought to life by Siri Hustvedt in her third novel, “What I Loved.” Narrated by Leo Hertzberg, 72, who begins his account as a 45-year-old art historian living in SoHo, the novel pulses with an electric current of ideas and people whom Leo remembers with a fierceness and particularity that bely his advancing age and physical infirmities. For Leo, we learn early in the book, is losing his vision to macular degeneration -- clouds in his eyes. Yet he asserts, “My pictures of the past are still vivid. It’s the present that’s been affected, and those people who were in my past and whom I still see have turned into beings blotted by clouds.”

Central to Leo’s recollections is Bill Wechsler, an artist whom Leo first encounters through one of his self-portraits, viewed at a Prince Street gallery in 1975. The painting, however, depicts not the artist but his subjects, a reclining young woman named Violet and another woman, visible only as her loafer-clad foot leaves the frame of the painting. The third person in the painting is a shadow, whether symbolizing the painter standing outside of the work or the viewer himself, Leo is not sure. Compelled to buy the painting for the pricey sum of $2,500, Leo arranges to meet the artist at his Bowery studio and is immediately drawn to the tall, handsome but disheveled Wechsler.

That meeting is enlivened by the two men’s discussion of how other artists and their work influence Bill’s. Their initial conversation, ranging from 17th century Dutch painter Jan Steen’s “The Morning Toilet,” in which a woman is removing her sock, to R. Crumb’s “Tales From the Land of Genitalia,” grows into a solid friendship. Eventually included are Leo’s wife, Erica, an English professor with whom he shares a passionate romance, and Bill’s awkward mate, Lucille, a writer of precise and distant poetry. The couples meet for dinner and discuss their intellectual pursuits. Erica and Lucille become pregnant at the same time and bear sons named Matthew and Mark. Bill buys into the building where Leo and Erica live. We see the couples settle in for a life of cordial, if somewhat scholarly, domesticity.

But as Leo remembers and reconstructs the thread of their tightly intertwined lives, he wonders, “What actually happens in our brains when we return to half-remembered places. What is memory’s perspective? Does the man revise the boy’s view or is the imprint relatively static, a vestige of what was once intimately known?” A prophetic statement, surely, as Bill’s life begins to be re-visioned when his model Violet returns from Paris in 1981, and the artist finally succumbs to the attraction that was sparked during their work together and leaves his family to move into the Bowery studio with his younger lover.

This is merely one of the unforeseen and interrelated transformations that Bill Wechsler -- his surname derived from the German word for change -- and others undergo in the course of Hustvedt’s engrossing novel. Bill’s art changes, from the flatness of his early figurative paintings to a series of three-dimensional, Joseph Cornell-like boxes that reinterpret everything from 19th century hysteria cases to Hansel and Gretel to the alphabet. Violet begins what will be a lifetime’s study of hysteria and eating disorders that will inform Bill’s work. Bill’s work influences Leo’s writing; Erica’s work in English literature creates a fast bond between her and Violet, initially a doctoral student. Leo and Erica’s son, Matthew, decides he will become an artist. Matthew and Mark play raucous games that have their own secret, childlike logic.

Yet Mark is a cipher of a child and an interloper in these early scenes, shuttled as he is between his mother, who at one point takes a job in Houston, and his father in New York. But even Mark’s relative absence in the first part of the book, which is capped by a heart-wrenching tragedy, changes as his behavior becomes tangled with and propels the latter sections of Leo’s narrative. In the process, “What I Loved” itself is transformed from an intellectually engaging novel to a taut and nerve-racking thriller that encompasses Mark and his friends Teddy Giles, Teenie Gold, Me and other habitues of the rave-crazed, drug-addled art scene that was characteristic of the late 1980s and 1990s.

Leo’s penchant for covering the same territory again and again in his narrative, revealing along the way new clues and insights unseen in earlier musings, recalls the painterly term pentimento, whereby the earlier images of a painter’s false starts or mistakes emerge through the subsequent brush strokes that cover it. A technique most famously seen in Caravaggio’s “The Lute Player,” it is the antithesis of Hustvedt’s painstaking construction of the novel. No image is wasted, no sentence superfluous in creating a novel that teems with ideas, emotions and, ultimately, regret. “What I Loved” bears the mark of a keen intellect and meticulous researcher whose analysis of Wechsler’s fictional works of art is as spot-on as her investigations into the hearts and souls of her complex characters. Hustvedt’s novel is a quietly astounding work of fiction that defies categorization as surely as its central characters defy the vision-impaired Leo’s clouded interpretations.