A review by sam_bizar_wilcox
The Birdcatcher by Gayl Jones

4.0

Gayl Jones' novel about black artist expats is a vision. Her book is at once a meditation on ambition and jealousy, as the novel spirals around the strange relationships of three artistic women: Amanda Wordlaw--writer, and one-time romance novelist; Catherine Shuger--sculptor, so in love and revolted by her husband that she frequently attempts to murder him; and Gilette--a white painter as dangerous as her razor-ous name suggests (or, is she?). The way these women talk to each other, and the men and children in their lives, uncover a restlessness with the status of the black woman artist. The Birdcatcher is Catherine's sculpture, something that she futilely works on as her husband encourages her to move on. Catherine becomes caught in a prison of her own making, both in her artistic pursuits and in a marriage she is unable to leave (despite numerous attempts to free herself from her husband...by murdering him). Amanda, on the other hand, is in constant flight; she's become a travel writer after ditching her husband, Lantis, and she no longer writes period romance novels but researched non-fiction that jets her off to Brazil, Ibiza, and Paris (or Cleveland?). She is free to narrate the relationship between Catherine and Ernest, and Catherine and herself, but what becomes clear quickly is how her voice becomes an imposition. She is not an objective narrator in her (so-called?) friend's life, but a woman with her own blindspots and obfuscating prose.

This is a dazzling book, written with insidious cruelty that (perhaps) hides a more sympathetic core.