METAMORPHOSIS: For Martin’s characters, art is an extension of life, vital and sometimes horrible.
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Novelist Valerie Martin has made a career of tackling the offbeat, the morally ambiguous, and the bizarre. Her Orange Prize–winning Property, for example, made a slave-owner’s jealousy of her own slave palpable, if not entirely sympathetic, and Mary Reilly gave us a protagonist half in love with the infamous Dr. Jekyll.Her new collection takes on an entire of unruly characters: artists. Novelists, poets, painters, printmakers, dancers, and actors are the central figures in these six stories, and Martin’s unsparing eye proves once again that art doesn’t ennoble. The process of creation, however, often transforms, and Martin captures all her prickly protagonists in moments of transition.
It’s not pretty, but these pivotal moments of personal and artistic crisis, while left unresolved, are enthralling and almost always enlightening. When Jack, the narrator of “His Blue Period,” first describes his relationship with an obnoxious fellow painter, Ansbach, he seems set up to tell the far more successful artist’s story. Only by degrees do we, and he, come to realize what role his own passivity has played in the lives of all around them. In “The Open Door,” poet Edith seems on the verge of splitting with her long-time lover Isabel, a dancer. But as the two replay their particular emotional dance — Edith the repressed American, Isabel the emotional Latina — Edith begins to recognize in her partner the fear and desperation she thought was hers alone.
For these characters, art is an extension of life, vital, sometimes horrible. At times the creative process is the only thing that keeps them going, as when Phil, in “Beethoven,” rejects the suggestion that he find a part-time job: “I don’t want to take the pressure off . . . The pressure is part of it.”
By enfolding the process of creation within these human dramas, Martin gives the reader several oblique takes on the role of art in the human condition. Most often, it’s a gift, distributed (like Anspach’s brilliant sense of color) without regard to equality or human worth. For some, like the repressed Edith, it offers salvation. She recalls discovering Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry: “This was life! This was light! This was hope, even for her!” Always, for Martin, it’s a window on personality, illuminating both creator and audience.
In fact, the only one of these stories that steps back from this unflinching study of character is the closer, “The Change.” Ostensibly about the relationship between a printmaker and her journalist husband, who feels his wife growing distant as she enters menopause, their story quickly becomes mystical. He knows of her mood swings, the hot flashes and waning sexual desire, but he’s painfully aware that her art is also changing, deepening as it darkens, with its moody depictions of a mythical forest. He, meanwhile, is denied growth, caught up in the stasis of writer’s block. A magical encounter could mark the end of that period, for both of them. “It was best to be still in such a presence,” he realizes, “which surely would not stay long or ever come again.”
