Scan barcode
A review by eveningreader
Life Drawing by Robin Black
5.0
“In the days leading up to my husband Owen’s death, he visited Alison’s house every afternoon. I would watch him trudge over the small, snowy hill between our two properties, half the time away from me, half the time toward me. And I wonder what he thought about as he went. Wonder too if Alison watched him from a window of her own, and whether the expression she saw on his face as he approached was very different from the one I saw as he came home.”
These are the opening lines of Robin Black’s debut novel, [b:Life Drawing|23602552|Life Drawing|Robin Black|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1421707556l/23602552._SY75_.jpg|25489128]. The story begins here, with Gus (Augusta) mourning her husband, and then stepping many months back into the past to tell the story of the events leading up to his death. It’s saying something, I think, that by the time I reached Owen’s death at the end of the book, I had become so completely absorbed in how the story was unfolding that I had forgotten entirely that I had already been told he was dead. I was shocked.
Gus and Owen are married, and they are both artists–she a painter, he a writer. Several years before the events of the book take place, they moved from Philadelphia to an old farmhouse in the country. For several years, they lived mostly in seclusion, away from their friends and family, trying to help their relationship recover from the infidelity (Gus’s) and infertility (Owen’s) that served to weaken their bond. And then one summer day, Gus is working in the garden when she hears an English voice call out a hello, and there appears Alison Hemmings, the new neighbor from a nearby farmhouse. Alison tells Gus that they are part of the reason that she chose to rent empty farmhouse for the summer, drawn by an advertisement that lists Gus and Owen (real life artists!) as features that make the property more attractive.
Alison reveals that she is newly divorced from an abusive man; she also has a twenty-two-year-old daughter, Nora, who has recently graduated from college. She has rented the property next door as an escape and retreat (not so different from Gus and Owen), and also as a place where she can focus on her own painting. Alison–and later Nora–become a part of Gus and Owen’s secluded world, to greatly detrimental effects.
So much is packed into this quiet, stunning little novel that’s it’s difficult to know where to begin. I read this on Kindle, and my version is accompanied by three short essays from the author about writing in general and about writing Life Drawing specifically. In one, “Intuitions,” Black explains that when she got the initial idea for the novel, she was at a week-long writing retreat and reading Ovid’s The Metamorphoses. She had almost officially given up on the idea of ever writing a novel at all–one had been due to her publisher years before as part of the two-book deal she had secured for her debut story collection [b:If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This|6942071|If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This|Robin Black|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320394716l/6942071._SY75_.jpg|7175136], and she had abandoned the draft after years of trying to make it work. At the retreat, she read for five days, wondering about Medusa and Galatea, and then on the sixth day, “I put Ovid to the side and wrote the first five thousand words of Life Drawing–five thousand words that have remained essentially the same through every revision.” And on the seventh day? No, she did not rest. She wrote the next four thousand words. Within a year, she had a draft.
Certainly, there’s more than a whiff of Greek tragedy here. What interests me most are the choices Black made. The novel is written in first person, from Gus’s viewpoint. One could probably make the argument that all first-person narrators are flawed, and Gus is no exception. To hear her tell it, everything is set in motion by the arrival of Alison. From the beginning, she’s not entirely welcome by Gus or Owen–they seem to know instinctively that she poses a threat to the fragile bubble they’ve created for themselves. From the reader’s standpoint (or at least, from this reader’s standpoint), everything is actually set in motion by Gus’s decision to tell Owen about her affair, an event that happens far outside the bounds of the book but really serves as the impetus for everything. There’s a certain amount of hubris in her revelation to Owen. He doesn’t discover the affair–he has no suspicions at all–instead she chooses to tell him to relieve herself of her own guilt. And then there’s her later decision to confide in Alison, not only about the affair but about her ongoing relationship with the daughter, Laine, who inadvertently shares current news about her father’s impending second marriage (Laine knows nothing of the affair). And Gus is also very clear, with the reader and with Alison, that the reason they can’t have children is because of Owen. There’s a mixture of penance and pity and guilt that drives her, and that colors everything about the story she tells.
Black explores the nature of infidelity, forgiveness, friendship, marriage, parenthood, artistic impulse, art itself, the nature of family, ideas of regret–in truth, at times, it all feels like too much. If this short novel has one flaw, it’s that too many things crowd the narrative. For example, there’s a bit of backstory about one of Gus’s paintings, the first painting she completed when her affair ended, and the brother and sister who owned the millinery shop that’s featured in the painting. Gus becomes briefly obsessed with the sister, but it’s never really clear why, and apart from the painting itself, none of this backstory lends anything to the narrative at large.
Another interesting thing: even though Gus is telling the story in first person (after Owen has died!), Owen comes across as rather flat and a bit of a sourpuss. While his mood is understandable given his trouble with his current work, Gus shares very little about happier times they had together. The reader never even learns how they met (and, weirdly, we never learn Owen’s last name). In contrast, the details Gus reveals about Bill and their affair are cast as…well, sort of tragically romantic, especially when she reveals that she thinks of Bill’s daughter Laine as her own surrogate child: “We were a distortion of the married couple whose marriage collapses when their child leaves home–as Bill’s to Georgia did not even two years later when their son went off to school. Our child left us and we fell in love.”
All this to say–Gus isn’t exactly likable (or she is), but she is relatable (or she isn’t). I was completely invested in her story, even as I frequently stood back and judged her harshly for some of the things she did or said. I wanted to see what would happen next, even though sometimes I really was rooting for Owen or for Alison and hoping that Gus would get just a leetle comeuppance. I had completely forgotten she had lost her husband, which should be comeuppance enough. But isn’t this also why so much of Greek literature endures? We know the tragic endings by heart, yet we keep reading because as the story is told, we forget. And when the ending comes, we are shocked all over again. Catharsis. That’s a trick that’s not to be underestimated, and Black pulls it off in spades.
These are the opening lines of Robin Black’s debut novel, [b:Life Drawing|23602552|Life Drawing|Robin Black|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1421707556l/23602552._SY75_.jpg|25489128]. The story begins here, with Gus (Augusta) mourning her husband, and then stepping many months back into the past to tell the story of the events leading up to his death. It’s saying something, I think, that by the time I reached Owen’s death at the end of the book, I had become so completely absorbed in how the story was unfolding that I had forgotten entirely that I had already been told he was dead. I was shocked.
Gus and Owen are married, and they are both artists–she a painter, he a writer. Several years before the events of the book take place, they moved from Philadelphia to an old farmhouse in the country. For several years, they lived mostly in seclusion, away from their friends and family, trying to help their relationship recover from the infidelity (Gus’s) and infertility (Owen’s) that served to weaken their bond. And then one summer day, Gus is working in the garden when she hears an English voice call out a hello, and there appears Alison Hemmings, the new neighbor from a nearby farmhouse. Alison tells Gus that they are part of the reason that she chose to rent empty farmhouse for the summer, drawn by an advertisement that lists Gus and Owen (real life artists!) as features that make the property more attractive.
Alison reveals that she is newly divorced from an abusive man; she also has a twenty-two-year-old daughter, Nora, who has recently graduated from college. She has rented the property next door as an escape and retreat (not so different from Gus and Owen), and also as a place where she can focus on her own painting. Alison–and later Nora–become a part of Gus and Owen’s secluded world, to greatly detrimental effects.
So much is packed into this quiet, stunning little novel that’s it’s difficult to know where to begin. I read this on Kindle, and my version is accompanied by three short essays from the author about writing in general and about writing Life Drawing specifically. In one, “Intuitions,” Black explains that when she got the initial idea for the novel, she was at a week-long writing retreat and reading Ovid’s The Metamorphoses. She had almost officially given up on the idea of ever writing a novel at all–one had been due to her publisher years before as part of the two-book deal she had secured for her debut story collection [b:If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This|6942071|If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This|Robin Black|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320394716l/6942071._SY75_.jpg|7175136], and she had abandoned the draft after years of trying to make it work. At the retreat, she read for five days, wondering about Medusa and Galatea, and then on the sixth day, “I put Ovid to the side and wrote the first five thousand words of Life Drawing–five thousand words that have remained essentially the same through every revision.” And on the seventh day? No, she did not rest. She wrote the next four thousand words. Within a year, she had a draft.
Certainly, there’s more than a whiff of Greek tragedy here. What interests me most are the choices Black made. The novel is written in first person, from Gus’s viewpoint. One could probably make the argument that all first-person narrators are flawed, and Gus is no exception. To hear her tell it, everything is set in motion by the arrival of Alison. From the beginning, she’s not entirely welcome by Gus or Owen–they seem to know instinctively that she poses a threat to the fragile bubble they’ve created for themselves. From the reader’s standpoint (or at least, from this reader’s standpoint), everything is actually set in motion by Gus’s decision to tell Owen about her affair, an event that happens far outside the bounds of the book but really serves as the impetus for everything. There’s a certain amount of hubris in her revelation to Owen. He doesn’t discover the affair–he has no suspicions at all–instead she chooses to tell him to relieve herself of her own guilt. And then there’s her later decision to confide in Alison, not only about the affair but about her ongoing relationship with the daughter, Laine, who inadvertently shares current news about her father’s impending second marriage (Laine knows nothing of the affair). And Gus is also very clear, with the reader and with Alison, that the reason they can’t have children is because of Owen. There’s a mixture of penance and pity and guilt that drives her, and that colors everything about the story she tells.
Black explores the nature of infidelity, forgiveness, friendship, marriage, parenthood, artistic impulse, art itself, the nature of family, ideas of regret–in truth, at times, it all feels like too much. If this short novel has one flaw, it’s that too many things crowd the narrative. For example, there’s a bit of backstory about one of Gus’s paintings, the first painting she completed when her affair ended, and the brother and sister who owned the millinery shop that’s featured in the painting. Gus becomes briefly obsessed with the sister, but it’s never really clear why, and apart from the painting itself, none of this backstory lends anything to the narrative at large.
Another interesting thing: even though Gus is telling the story in first person (after Owen has died!), Owen comes across as rather flat and a bit of a sourpuss. While his mood is understandable given his trouble with his current work, Gus shares very little about happier times they had together. The reader never even learns how they met (and, weirdly, we never learn Owen’s last name). In contrast, the details Gus reveals about Bill and their affair are cast as…well, sort of tragically romantic, especially when she reveals that she thinks of Bill’s daughter Laine as her own surrogate child: “We were a distortion of the married couple whose marriage collapses when their child leaves home–as Bill’s to Georgia did not even two years later when their son went off to school. Our child left us and we fell in love.”
All this to say–Gus isn’t exactly likable (or she is), but she is relatable (or she isn’t). I was completely invested in her story, even as I frequently stood back and judged her harshly for some of the things she did or said. I wanted to see what would happen next, even though sometimes I really was rooting for Owen or for Alison and hoping that Gus would get just a leetle comeuppance. I had completely forgotten she had lost her husband, which should be comeuppance enough. But isn’t this also why so much of Greek literature endures? We know the tragic endings by heart, yet we keep reading because as the story is told, we forget. And when the ending comes, we are shocked all over again. Catharsis. That’s a trick that’s not to be underestimated, and Black pulls it off in spades.