PSYCHOLOGICAL DRAMA: meets mini-thriller in Crows. |
In his latest work of fiction, Adam Braver has taken on his trickiest writing challenge yet and pulled it off. A psychological drama — and eventually an art-world mini-thriller — Crows Over the Wheatfield is his best yet.Claire Andrews, a Van Gogh scholar on her way home from teaching, is driving in congested traffic, worrying about a careless redheaded boy speeding along on his skateboard at the brink of traffic. She allows one angry momentary distraction — maneuvering to not let a blithely aggressive driver cut her off — and she is the one who strikes the boy down. Eventually Claire learns that not only has she killed a child but that he was the grandson of a cutthroat lawyer. Former city attorney Fletcher Kennealy is not, she suspects, above hiring a girl to wear a sandwich board showing a school photograph blow-up of the victim and stand accusingly mute at the entrance to her university.
The introversive Claire is driven deeper inside herself. She is confronted by the nagging questions of life and death that people tend to put off till later than her 38 years, or forever. Her husband, from whom she has been separated, is immediately at her side and supportive, sleeping on the couch. Does she want him back? Does she trust him to not pull away emotionally and question whether he loves her, as he did once before?
Braver has created a woman on the verge. On the verge of what? That’s for the reader to question, whether she’s up against the burst floodgates of a pent-up life, a nervous breakdown, suicide. The novelist skillfully eases and tightens the tension, adjusting the pace of unfolding events and the ebb and flow of Claire’s inner turmoil.
What keeps this from being an extended New Yorker story of convoluted mental life is the perfect external parallel to her inner state: Vincent Van Gogh’s “Crows In the Wheatfield.” Van Gogh’s final painting depicts the place he would soon come back to, press a revolver to his chest and attempt suicide, dying a few days after. The painting’s central winding road leads to a dark blue sky filled with crude double Vs that merge with starless black patches.
Escaping the pressures at home, Claire re-visits Auvers-sur-Oise and the spot where Van Gogh took his life. She needs to finish a long-overdue monograph on the painter’s “Portrait of Dr. Gachet.” (In a 1990 auction, it received the highest price to that point for a Van Gogh, $82.5 million.) The novel becomes a bit of a literary thriller, beginning with surmise and ending with her uncovering a shocking fact about the painting.
The literary aspect is that this discovery, and what she does with the information that will turn the art world on its ear, is no mere plot device to pique our interest. As Claire explores Van Gogh’s state of mind, compelled to empathize, we see her come out of herself and into the world, as the artist never successfully could. Through remarks in his letters, we see him idolize Paul Gauguin, whose painting style he would emulate. His portrait subject, Dr. Gachet, was counseling him psychiatrically. Inexplicably, the artist states to his ever-supportive brother Theo that the physician is probably more troubled than he is, but revealing nothing specific. That explanation is up to Claire, and the author has her make a plausible, if invented, case for Van Gogh’s tragic disillusionment.
