Well-written review, good analysis.

I just finished listening to the book, as I often listen while commuting. Having read Shields's other book, the Fig Eater, I can't help but notice her interest in writing about this particular time frame. In the Fig Eater, she works out some ideas about rational v irrational ways of knowing the world through the novelistic trope of the detective story. The mystery at the heart of that novel is the brutal murder of a Viennese, Victorian young woman, Dora. In the novel there is both direct and indirect reference to the Dora who was the historical subject of Freud's case study on hysteria. This would place the novel in the just pre-WWI timeframe and announces among other things that Shields is interested in psychoanalysis, but more deeply, identity. In some ways, this first novel can be read as a critique of the high value given to rational and deterministic explanations promulgated through Freudian theory.
For me then, The Crimson Portrait is less about the war or the star-crossed love lives of its characters but again about the nature of identity. I can easily understand the disappointment of those who might expect more from the overt narrative along the lines of such tropes as a romantic novel or a war novel or an historical novel. The fragmentation of the novel's narrative reflects the tension between the personal and the impersonal that war, any cataclysmic historical event, healing and even love can set in motion.
I suggest that she is writing about identity precisely because very early on, she begins to use the idea of reflective surfaces, mirrors, water, masks that serve as metaphor for how we are seen by the world or how we see ourselves from an "objective" view. So, Shields is operating most clearly through the set-up, the characters and the multiple, incomplete nature of her narrative to be talking about the fragmenting nature of identity and meaning in our current world.
In this respect, I find her novel to be a very rich, compelling read. Her ability to paint a picture with words or to evoke an ethos I found deeply moving. Yet, I don't think she intends for her readers to find her characters sympathetic. She has other fish to fry. Frustrating her readers' desires for satisfying interpersonal relationships may be one of the devices she uses to explore the nature of alienation that we all can feel as a suffering of the modern, or perhaps more accurately, postmodern world we inhabit in 2007. We can see our own suffering perhaps more clearly as if through the mirror of 1915, and its more stylized evocations of the struggles we are a party to in a world that is increasingly dominated by patriarchally driven values of rationality and objectivity. This is what I imagine to be Ms. Shields' deeper and more far-reaching intentions in both this and her earlier work. And in this, I believe she was quite successful. Yet, I can long for more satisfying resolutions. Perhaps, she isn't interested in providing her readers such comfort, perhaps she believes this would undermine her basic interest in painting a picture of the devasting effects modern culture has on love and the individual identity.

Thank you for your thoughtful comments! I cannot disagree with your analysis. I really wanted to feel that way about the novel too, but I didn't, and I can only report my reaction to what I read. I did not read The Fig Eater and now I wonder if it would have framed this novel differently for me.