When we first read The Dog Stars in 2012, we were fired up for Heller’s unique style–sparse prose, wide landscapes, and characters that seem more comfortable in the natural world then they do in company. Here was a book for all of us itching to just get away for awhile.
Well, Peter Heller is BACK. And not only has he written another lovely novel, he’s coming back to Lemuria (and as our FEC pick for May) June 10th at 5 PM.
We love first novels; it’s a chance for us to meet someone new, to go to a place nobody has written us into yet. Second novels are a bit trickier to pull off. Peter Heller has done a bang up job; The Painter is a bit of Dostoyevsky and a bit of Hemingway.
“I never imagined I would shoot a man. Or be a father. Or live so far from the sea.
As a child, you imagine your life sometimes, how it will be.”
And so we are off with a gunshot. Jim Stegner, the novel’s protagonist splits his time between Southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico. He is a painter, but he is also a fly-fisherman. This division is Stegner’s strength and flaw–he paints in a fury as untamable as his temper and fishes with the patience of a monk.
We never do see the artwork Jim Stegner paints. Each chapter is headed with a placard of the work that makes an appearance in each chapter:
I’m pleased that we don’t see the paintings. Something would be stolen from us. Peter Heller works well with the negative space of the story–sometimes what isn’t shown is just as important as what is. Like Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, Jim Stegner can’t help but give himself away when his inner turmoil works its way onto the canvas.
John Ashbery wrote a poem titled “The Painter.” I happened to read it while I was reading Peter Heller’s The Painter. The two share a similar spirit–the artist at odds with the world around him (and inside him):
He enjoyed painting the sea’s portrait.
But just as children imagine a prayer
Is merely silence, he expected his subject
To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush,
Plaster its own portrait on the canvas.
Put him to work: “Try using the brush
As a means to an end. Select, for a portrait,
Something less angry and large, and more subject
To a painter’s moods, or, perhaps, to a prayer.”
How could he explain to them his prayer
That nature, not art, might usurp the canvas?
He chose his wife for a new subject,
Making her vast, like ruined buildings,
As if, forgetting itself, the portrait
Had expressed itself without a brush.
Slightly encouraged, he dipped his brush
In the sea, murmuring a heartfelt prayer:
“My soul, when I paint this next portrait
Let it be you who wrecks the canvas.”
The news spread like wildfire through the buildings:
He had gone back to the sea for his subject.
Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
Too exhausted even to lift his brush,
He provoked some artists leaning from the buildings
To malicious mirth: “We haven’t a prayer
Now, of putting ourselves on canvas,
Or getting the sea to sit for a portrait!”
Others declared it a self-portrait.
Finally all indications of a subject
Began to fade, leaving the canvas
Perfectly white. He put down the brush.
At once a howl, that was also a prayer,
Arose from the overcrowded buildings
They tossed him, the portrait, from the tallest of the buildings;
And the sea devoured the canvas and the brush
As though his subject had decided to remain a prayer.
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