A review by hilaritas
How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall

3.0

I admired this novel a great deal, but it never quite connected with me in a deep way. Hall is a very assured writer, and her prose is graceful and lush. The novel is structured with alternating chapters following four loosely connected characters, each written in a different voice (first, second or third person). It felt a bit mannered but I ultimately thought it worked pretty well. The form really distinguishes each character and gives a somewhat different flavor of perspective in empathizing with the main characters, although each chapter gives an omniscient approach to interior thoughts regardless of grammatical voice. I thought most of the main characters worked well except the blind girl chapters, which seemed to veer into a fair amount of cliche. I especially liked the painter who gets lost in his reminiscences while trapped under a boulder, and his daughter who struggled with the death of her twin brother. Those two characters felt real and convincingly shaded.

The overall tone of the novel is elegiac and thoughtful. However, it never really gelled or reached any kind of satisfying crescendo in my mind. The stories sort of peter out or reach pat endings that don't contain any element of surprise or subversion. Each of the endings plays with big, Deep Thoughts of death and life, meaning and art. But I didn't really feel like any of them were especially insightful. I wish Hall had spent a little more time reworking the endings, as I think this had a lot more potential than was realized here.