Muddy prose bogs down this Van Gogh quest

SOME novelists seem to have a knack for coming up with ways of sparking a reader’s, not to mention a publisher’s, interest. Adam Braver’s first book, “Mr. Lincoln’s Wars,” was a set of stories purporting to offer a glimpse into the mind of America’s greatest president. A second famous historical figure furnished the candlepower for his next book, “Divine Sarah,” a novel about the defiantly unconventional actress Sarah Bernhardt.

In “Crows Over the Wheatfield,” Braver’s still not taking any chances. He’s hung this story from not just one hook but two: an art historian’s sudden brush with mortality and her quest to understand the last days of the genius Vincent van Gogh. If there’s one device even more attention-grabbing than a charismatic historical figure, it’s a life-altering accident, which is how this novel begins.

The heroine, Claire Andrews, is a 39-year-old art history professor at a college in Providence, R.I., who, driving home from work one evening, accidentally hits and kills a young boy on a skateboard. Although it’s evident that the accident was not Claire’s fault (the boy was fooling around recklessly in heavy traffic), she is shattered by the experience. The opening scene powerfully conveys the accident itself and the stunned state of shock and confusion that descends upon Claire in its immediate aftermath.

In her traumatized state, she turns to her former husband, Richard, who stays with Claire and helps her through the ordeal. Their lawyer assures them that she isn’t legally culpable, but Claire is still horribly shaken up. And then, as if her own feelings of guilt and depression weren’t bad enough, the boy’s grandfather turns out to be a notoriously manipulative local power broker who launches a media campaign against Claire.

Having been planning to write a book on Van Gogh, Claire decides this is a good time to get away from Providence and revisit the French town of Auvers-sur-Oise, where the artist spent the last few months of his troubled life. Despite the fact that he was supposed to be under the care of Dr. Gachet, an art-loving physician, Vincent ended his days by walking into a wheat field and shooting himself, though not before producing a number of famous works, including two portraits of his doctor and the somber, haunting landscape that furnishes this novel with its title.

Claire has long entertained suspicions about Dr. Gachet concerning Van Gogh’s death. On this trip, by a piece of pure happenstance, she encounters a man who has discovered important information that lends weight to her hypothesis. Thematically and structurally, this chance meeting serves as a happy accident, in contrast to the one that killed the boy. Yet, publishing the information in her book could harm the man who confided it in her.

But all of this -- Claire’s feelings about the accident, her relationship with Richard and what she has to say about Van Gogh -- sounds a lot more interesting in prospect than it turns out to be. The parts of the novel dealing with the accident and its repercussions are believable enough, if something short of profoundly moving. Claire’s behavior toward Richard is so unpleasant, though, as to leave you wondering what he sees in her.

And even apart from whether or not Claire’s theory on Van Gogh and Dr. Gachet’s role in his death would pass muster with knowledgeable art historians, the account we’re given of her theory is so vague, patchy, garbled and woefully inadequate as to make very little sense at all -- except perhaps for the sense of anticlimax experienced by the reader, who may well have expected something more convincing than “explanations” such as this one: “But what Gachet had failed to consider was that his dire predictions cast the illusion of an idyllic present to his patient. Coming to Auvers and escaping the swirled dreams that told the story of the South had all shone brightly on the painter.”

Foggy thinking here seems to go hand in hand with bad writing. It’s been a long time since I’ve encountered a book as poorly written as this. We’re not talking here about bad writing in the sense of purple prose or over-the-top experimental pyrotechnics. Or the kind of cliched, slick, yet serviceable prose that moves you along from one page to the next of the latest potboiler. This, on the contrary, is bad writing of an entirely different order, writing you trip and stumble over, writing you don’t expect from any professional writer like Braver, who teaches creative writing and whose books have enjoyed some critical success. This is prose you’d downgrade on a freshman composition paper: awkward, imprecise, flaccid and tin-eared, riddled with faulty diction, misused prepositions, dangling participles and mangled verb tenses.

The reader is continually brought up short by passages such as: “Claire ... reached for her laptop, hoping to lose herself to the computer world. She scanned the news headlines. The state of the world only further riled her, sickened by the helpless reality that the educated middle class will never rise from the ashes of elitist embers.”

We may perhaps know -- or think we know -- how Claire feels, not because Braver has made it particularly clear but merely because we might have similar feelings about the state of the world which enable us to guess at what Braver may have been trying to convey. With chapter after chapter of writing that impedes reading, this book should send lovers of Van Gogh back to Irving Stone’s page-turning, and far more compelling, biographical novel “Lust for Life.” As for readers looking for a novel that sheds light on the trauma of accidents, they’d be well advised to hit the brakes before getting tangled up in Braver’s muddy prose.

Merle Rubin is a critic whose reviews have appeared in the Washington Times, Wall Street Journal and Christian Science Monitor.