Vreeland’s carefully and thoroughly researched narrative creates a palpable, sometimes too-thickly, almost Rococo-textured impression of some of the major sights, sounds, colors, smells, and tastes of late nineteenth century bohemian Paris. Café life, the art world, Montmartre, the literary and social salons of bourgeois Paris, the seventy-two day siege known as the Paris Commune of 1871 and more help “set the positions and values over the whole canvas” of the novel. Yet, it is the process of painting, and the characters themselves - Renoir and his friends and models - that ultimately carry the novel.

“Let them see ... the workings of his hand. If viewers saw only the things depicted and not the act of painting, they were missing half the pleasure,” Renoir muses. Vreeland agrees and brushes her text with thick daubs of passages describing the artist at work. “He squeezed out paint onto the palette, small, lovely dollops shining in the sun ... He bent the hogs’ hair of his brand new broad flat to break the sizing and try out the balance of it. Where to make the first stroke? ... He slashed a diagonal for the railing with the palest, most watery ultramarine and rose madder diluted with linseed and turpentine ... Pure joy to touch down here and there.”

Vreeland is at her best when the vivacity and surety of her dazzling prose captures the artist at work. Color, timbre, and mood blend brilliantly into a compelling depiction of the act of painting and representation of a painter as much possessed by his subjects as he wishes to possess them. “The important thing,” Renoir tells one of his models, “is not what’s going on, but how it conveys what’s going on … Painting, the act of it, that’s what’s important.”

Yet Vreeland takes a big risk by making process — ”Painting, the act of it” — the subject of her novel. To make her subjects — painting, people, the convulsed social life of Paris itself — come alive to serve the purpose of this story risks turning them into caricatures of themselves, objects to be manipulated to create a desired shimmering effect. That this mimics in verbal representation Renoir’s visual process is both the novel’s strength and its weakness. “If I had wanted to tell a story I would have used a pen,” Renoir declares. But Vreeland is telling a story. The question is: has she found the right form for the kind of story she wants to tell?

At times, one feels Vreeland working, like Renoir, at cross-purposes, trying to force a more traditionally structured approach to the novel — a well-plotted story thick with descriptively rich characterizations and detailed scenes — into service to more modern, “impressionistic” ends. For instance, Vreeland represents Renoir’s arrogant obsession with being known as “a painter of women” by coloring her narrative with sexual innuendos and even quoting Renoir’s own infamous statements about women: “I can’t see myself getting into bed with a lawyer, if there are such female monsters. I like women best when they don’t know how to read, and when they wipe their babies’ bottoms themselves.”

Article Author: Kathy Jones

Kathleen B. Jones is a writer and former professor of women’s studies at San Diego State University, where she taught for nearly a quarter century. In addition to four scholarly books on feminist politics, she published one memoir, Living Between Danger …

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