Art gone awry

A restless, mischief-seeking intelligence infuses the fiction of British author Patrick McGrath. His previous novels, which include the avidly received “Asylum” and “Martha Peake,” are frequently called “neo-Gothic” -- a fair-enough tag, although what “neo” stands for here isn’t quite clear, given that a McGrath tale brews together such classic gothic ingredients as darkness and dampness, copious blood flow and sardonic laughter, all served up in a prose of 19th century exactitude. But never mind the label.

Essentially, his carefully constructed novels excel in the layer-by-layer dissection of human ambiguities, from the provocative to the downright unsavory. Forbidden, erotic obsession -- that trusty lure to readers from “Oedipus Rex” down to the Britney mythology -- not only provides his plots with their core fuel, it’s often also the sole source of warmth among characters notable for their narcissism and tortured rationalizations. Other topics likely to surface in a McGrath novel include the paradoxical loyalty of violated innocence to a chronic abuser (Stockholm syndrome, home-style), the mesmerizing power of beauty and ugliness and the amoral psychological makeup and egocentricity of the committed artist. None of these new, all of abiding interest.

McGrath’s latest novel, “Port Mungo,” offers a portrait of the artist-hero that shifts like a hologram. Jack Rathbone is a charismatic, born-to-the-canvas painter who lights out from art school in London for Beat Generation New York City at age 17, inflamed by a passion for truth, beauty and, most decisively, a Circean wild-child painter 23 years his senior. Soon enough, the dissipated city life looks more like a death threat to art than a promise, and Jack retreats with his paints and gap-toothed piratical muse, Vera Savage, to the remotest hole imaginable: Port Mungo, a “river town now gone to seed, wilting and steaming among the mangrove swamps of the Gulf of Honduras.” At some point a daughter is born and left to grow up a “careless free spirit, running wild,” while feckless Vera drinks and drifts. Meanwhile, Jack drinks and works, “with a ferocious discipline ... pouring more and more of himself into his painting.”

The narrator who trails this Dionysian couple from a distance, sustaining Jack with dollops of family money and bottomless encouragement, is his adoring sister Gin. At one point, having again fished Jack out of trouble, she reports: “We fell silent, we smoked, we were comfortably drunk. I was startled by the simple clarity of his commitment. Neither his own comfort nor his child’s future, apparently, would change the course he had chosen. Perhaps he was a kind of missionary after all: a priest of art.”

Jack and Gin Rathbone (savor those names!) came of age in a Bronte-esque environment: storm-swept rural manse, distant father as sole parent. Gin’s sharp, witty, judgmental voice, at pains to disguise her own deeper emotions, is the medium through which “Port Mungo” takes form. She shares with certain previous McGrath narrators the curious characteristic of possessing only second- or third-hand knowledge of much of the main action: Private, unwitnessed moments (intimate conversations; sexual encounters) are simply reconstructed whole-cloth from the piecemeal evidence available.

It’s an odd choice of authorial method, to saddle a work of pure fiction with the notorious awkwardness of “fictionalized” biography -- thus Gin: “I imagine from what he told me that they were in bed for this conversation, that it was late morning.... She turned to him, squinting; then her face changed, she stretched out a hand and took his jaw in her fingers....” But for all her strenuous imagining, an erotic ur-tension dooms Gin’s quest for objectivity. Raffish, abundantly gifted Jack Rathbone, protagonist of “Port Mungo,” is the protagonist of his sister’s life.

Rathbone’s trajectory looks a lot like a Gauguin-esque romance, as the novel mentions. What’s more, the one painter who awes Jack into silence is Mark Rothko, shades of whom he also appropriates. In fact, the notion of artistic “theft” is a central conundrum in “Port Mungo.” Short of stroke-for-line copying, does such a crime really exist among artists of serious intent? Or is “theft,” when applied to art, mere capitalist-individualist blather? Isn’t art a collective achievement, a triumph of humanity’s vision over time and space? And anyway, how to completely divide out the sparks of Bloomsbury-ish creative circles striking more sparks?

A mini-scandal recently erupted over an accusation that the plot of “Lolita” was “lifted” by Vladimir Nabokov from an obscure German writer’s strikingly congruent short story. A defender of Nabokov might argue that “source doesn’t matter; what counts is what you make of the raw material. Shakespeare ‘stole’ from Holinshed. Etc.” Which sounds right. And yet. And yet. At what point is damage done?

A fortuitous twist on the issue of originality is that the zeitgeist is fostering a crop of novels, movies and plays about the 20th century New York art scene and sexualized parent-child relationships. Sister Gin, for all her acuity, turns out to be rather a dim narrator; blinded by reverence, she fails almost to the novel’s end to see what’s clearly foreshadowed a third of the way in, when tropical Jack, instead of reaching for the Betadine to disinfect his little girl’s dirty, injured foot, urinates on it. True to its author’s gothic roots, “Port Mungo” doesn’t always shy from incidents stronger on shock value than credibility, and perhaps this is why the book, taken as a whole, feels less solid than the sum of its arresting parts. The most memorable pages of this engrossing novel come from a writer working forward, discarding the props and masks of genre for nuanced portraiture. *