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Summary
Summary
Peter Heller, the celebrated author of the breakout best-seller The Dog Stars , returns with an achingly beautiful, wildly suspenseful second novel about an artist trying to outrun his past.
Years ago, a well-known expressionist painter named Jim Stegner shot a man in a bar. The man lived, Jim served his time, and he has learned to live with the dark impulses that sometimes overtake him. Jim enjoys a quiet life in the valleys of Colorado. He works with a lovely model, he doesn't drink, he goes fly fishing in the evenings. His paintings fetch excellent prices at a posh gallery in Santa Fe. He is--if he can admit it--almost happy. One day, driving down a dirt road, Jim sees a man beating a small horse. Jim leaps out of the truck, tackles the man, and bloodies his nose. The man is Dell, a cruel hunting outfitter notorious among locals. Jim cannot shake his rage over the little horse. The next night, under a full moon, telling himself he is just going night fishing, he returns to the creek where Dell has his camp and kills him. As Jim tries to come to terms with what he has done, he must evade the police, navigate his own conscience, and escape the members of Dell's clan set on revenge. And he paints the whole time; trying to make sense of his actions. Traveling from the rough adobe cottages and rivers of Colorado to the bright streets and galleries of Santa Fe, aching with grief and transcendent with beauty, The Painter is a story about art and love and violence, and using the remnants of hardship to create a rich life.
Author Notes
Peter Heller is the best-selling author of The Dog Stars . He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in both fiction and poetry. An award-winning adventure writer and a longtime contributor to NPR, Heller is a contributing editor at Outside magazine, Men's Journal , and National Geographic Adventure , and a regular contributor to Bloomberg Businessweek . He is also the author of several nonfiction books, including Kook, The Whale Warriors , and Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet's Tsangpo River . He lives in Denver, Colorado.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Jim Stegner, celebrated painter, ardent fisherman and homespun philosopher, narrates this masterful novel, in which love (parental and romantic), artistic vision, guilt, grief, and spine-chilling danger propel a suspenseful plot. In one aspect of his personality, Jim is a gentle, introspective man who reads and quotes poetry, feels at one with nature, and has full-hearted empathy with animals. But every now and then, if provocation occurs, rage-"a red blindness"-swells up in him and destroys any restraint. When the novel opens, Jim has already served prison time for beating a man who leered at his teenage daughter. Now his daughter is dead, murdered at age 15, and Jim feels bitter guilt and endless remorse for the girl's death. After the tragedy, Jim's wife left him. He has retreated to a little house in a Colorado valley where he is painting with new urgency, beginning an affair with his young model, and conquering his alcohol and gambling addictions. When he comes upon a man brutally beating a horse, however, Jim's rage rises again. The rest of Heller's story includes two murders that Jim is involved with, and also a period of artistic flowering, as paintings that portray his psychological state flow from his palette. Heller (The Dog Stars) is equally skillful at describing the creation of a painting as he is at describing the thrilling details of a gunfight. Here, he explores the mysteries of the human heart and creates an indelible portrait of a man searching for peace, while seeking to maintain his humanity in the face of violence and injustice. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Heller's first novel, The Dog Stars (2012), a muscularly literary postapocalyptic tale, became a blazing best-seller. Here he takes the frenetic energy down a notch without diminishing suspense as he portrays an artist with the heart of a killer. Though renowned and well off, with a top gallery in Santa Fe, painter Jim Stegner is haunted by grief and guilt. He served time for shooting a dangerous man who made lewd remarks about Jim's blossoming daughter, who later died under circumstances he can't bear to think about. Seeking peace in the glories of land and sky and the Zen of fly-fishing, Jim has just settled into a small house in the Colorado wilderness, where he's painting with great intensity, inspired by the best model he's ever had, smart, tough Sophia. Then he encounters a man brutally beating a horse. Jim ends up murdering this notoriously violent, much-feared hunting outfitter, putting an abrupt end to his quest for serenity. As Jim duels with the police and the dead man's kin, he keeps painting, creating provoking, elegiac, and jubilant works fueled by anguish and love. Heller's writing is sure-footed and rip-roaring, star-bright and laced with dark yearning, coalescing in an ever-escalating, ravishing, grandly engrossing and satisfying tale of righteousness and revenge, artistic fervor and moral ambiguity.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
JIM STEGNER - the narrator of Peter Heller's second novel, "The Painter" - burns hot. When rage finds him, "everything goes dark at the edges. Kind of tunnels down to the target." This temper drove him, years ago, to pull a .41 Magnum and shoot a known sex offender point blank. Jim is big, bearded, often in paint-splatted clothes, overly fond of vanilla cheroots. A former alcoholic, now sober. His daughter dead, stabbed during a drug deal. Locals call him Hemingway. Scholars and collectors call him "working class," an "outsider." He responds by gripping an interviewer's hand and crushing the bones in a live broadcast that goes viral. Jim is also an avid fisherman, attuned to the river's thrumming pulse (as was the narrator of Heller's debut, the excellent novel "The Dog Stars"). He holds onto his fly rod like a rudder that will guide him through life's white water. He used it when fishing with his daughter, and he uses it now to commune with her and escape whatever rage or confusion has seized him. "I might not have counted on a paint-brush or a bottle of bourbon to save me," he says, "but I had counted on fishing." He's served his time in prison, given up booze, gambling, two ugly marriages. He wants to escape, arrive at a happy silence of mind. He seems to have found the ideal setting in this quiet Colorado valley, "a good place I guess to make a field of peace, to gather and breathe." But "life does not get less strange," Jim tells us, and one day he sees a man beating a small horse. This is Dell, a local outfitter who leads elk hunting expeditions, a front for a lucrative poaching operation. Jim's temper once again possesses him when he tackles Dell, bloodying his nose. Jim cannot shake the "whimper of the mare like a human baby, eye rolled back, absolute terror." He couldn't protect his daughter, but by God he'll protect the roan. He heads to the river the next night to fish, but soon sets down his rod and approaches the hunting camp and brains Dell with a rock. He might get away with murder, as long as he can escape his pursuers. There's Dell's brother, Grant, who burns barns, fires a bullet through a window and chases Jim down winding country roads in his truck. There's the manipulative police officer who can't secure enough evidence to name Jim a suspect. And there are the reporters tantalized by the possibility of the vigilante artist. All of this makes for an entertaining setup, and several of the brawls and chase scenes have an edge-of-your-seatness that kept me turning the pages swiftly. Heller often writes with a clipped voice, relying heavily on fragments. But when Jim takes to the mountains or streams, an unwound lyricism takes over, Heller at his best: "Under the moon the white water would be rips and tears in the darkness, the pools black, or maybe black with the bright moon reflected there, the trout lost to sight but looking up themselves into a bright firmament." Heller has spent much of his career writing outdoor adventure articles for Men's Journal, Outside and other magazines, and he has a keen, worshipful eye when describing the natural world: a trout hooked, a wave surfed. We often see Jim fishing or painting, and these scenes can be striking - especially when they are interactive: when Jim asks his flirty model to mock swim while he paints her dozens of times for a piece called "An Ocean of Women," or when he fishes, as a kind of macho contest, alongside a man who has made clear his intent to avenge Dell. Here the painting feels lively, the fishing purposeful. Causal instead of casual, contributing to the story's progression - romance, revenge - and not just metaphoric or thematic flourish. But more often Jim is alone. In "The Dog Stars," the solitude was terrifying, suffocating, something to overcome. But here, seclusion feels more like an epiphanic device. Something happens (a fistfight, a yelling match, a police interview) and Jim retreats to the canvas to paint a symbolic picture, or to the river to think deep thoughts. Not only do these moments feel like a brake too often feathered on a steep grade, disrupting the story's natural momentum, but their abundance creates a tiresome familiarity. "That we can do the same things again and again and again and find them interesting, even fascinating, and seek the repetition with a hunger as avid," Jim says. "How fishing was like that, and painting." A fine thought - if only it applied equally to reading about these activities. Because of the emotional sameness and redundant action, the novel feels thinner than its 360 pages. Reading a novel about a painter is a little like watching a film about a writer. The page can't adequately capture the vivid smear of paint, and the screen can't adequately capture the novelist's imaginings (outside of a brow furrowed, paper crumpled and hurled across the room). Yes, Jim is annoyed by the business of art, the theatrics of dealers and consumers, so he's not naturally inclined to wax on about aesthetics, but for credibility's sake, it would be nice to get some inside baseball: a few thoughts on expressionism, why he chooses oils over acrylics, how he blends colors, uses different brushes and tools for variant effects. To be fair, there are several beautiful passages about Winslow Homer and Picasso (in whom Jim realizes the "arousal" of voyeurism, the "dark yearning" of idealization), as well as an acerbic critique of Santa Fe kitsch. But more often Heller simply lists Jim's subjects - a woman, a chicken, a river - as they appear on the canvas, which then serves as a mirror for Jim's latest emotional crisis. After a portly detective (nicknamed Wheezy) encourages Jim to turn himself in, the narrator is so sickened by guilt he vomits. Then "I painted a horse covered in blue and red fish and I put the horse on the edge of a cliff and I put a crow with a blue eye on a rock watching him. The crow's bill was half open. That's all. I liked it. The crow was not exactly disinterested, and though a dead horse would mean a big feast, a crow potlatch, the bird I think was telling the horse about choice, that he didn't have to jump." It's a lovely description, but when every painting is a mirror, the effect lessens. The poetry Jim quotes feels equally coercive. A novel about a painter already calls attention to artifice. When he muses about Rilke and Eliot, studying their poems for insight, rather than feeling swept away by the novel I became aware of it as a manufactured object. As ridiculous as it may sound, I thought of the moment in "Evil Dead II" when Bruce Campbell chain-saws off his hand and jails it in an upside-down wastebasket weighted with ... "A Farewell to Arms." On-the-nose allusions can be funny, but when dealt out earnestly, they're a bit corny. If "The Painter" is sometimes clumsy, though, it's easy to see past its gangly awkwardness to its pure heart. This is an ultimately moving story about love, celebrity and the redemptive power of art. BENJAMIN PERCY is the author, most recently, of the novel "Red Moon."
Library Journal Review
One of the most admired expressionist painters in the Southwest, Jim Stegner leads a private life divided by grief at the loss of his daughter, his passion for fishing, and a propensity for violence. The action of the story is initiated by Jim's encounter with a man abusing a horse, and it escalates as he is chased by brothers set on revenge. Mark Deakins's reading transports listeners to fishing spots and makes the brushstrokes of Stegner's paintings come alive. The female characters-his model, his holistic savior, and the imagined voice of his teenage daughter-are a grounded supporting cast in this memorable book. VERDICT Heller's title is especially rewarding for audiences who love adventure and art but also a very strong choice for general listeners. ["Difficult to define by genre, this novel embraces themes of personal loss and growth, drama and suspense, while also including plenty for those who enjoy art or nature fiction. Highly recommended," read the starred review of the Knopf hc, LJ 4/15/14.]-Joyce Kessel, Villa Maria Coll., Buffalo (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
BOOK ONE Mayhem OIL ON LINEN 40 x 50 INCHES COLLECTION OF THE ARTIST 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. I never thought I would be a painter. That I might make a world and walk into it and forget myself. That art would be something I would not have any way of not doing. My own father was a logger, very gentle, who never fought with anyone. I could not have imagined that my daughter would be beautiful and strong like my mother. Whom she would never meet. Or that one afternoon at the Boxcar in Taos I would be drinking Jim Beam with a beer back and Lauder Simms would be at the next stool nursing a vodka tonic, probably his fourth or fifth, slurping the drink in a way that made ants run over my neck, his wet eyes glancing over again and again. The fucker who had skated on a certain conviction for raping a twelve year old girl in his movie theater downtown, looking at me now, saying, "Jim, your daughter is coming up nice, I like seeing her down at the theater." "Come again?" "Long legged like her mom, I mean not too skinny." "What?" "I don't mean too skinny, Jim. I mean just--" His leer, lips wet with tonic. "She's real interested in movies. Everything movies. I'm gonna train her up to be my little projectionist--" I never imagined something like that could be reflex, without thought: pulling out the .41 magnum, raising it to the man half turned on the stool, pulling the trigger. Point blank. The concussion inside the windowless room. Or how everything explodes like the inside of a dream and how Johnny, my friend, came lunging over the bar, over my arm, to keep me from pulling the trigger again. Who saved my life in a sense because the man who should have died never did. How the shot echoed for hours inside the bar, inside my head. Echoed for years. I painted that moment, the explosion of colors, the faces. How regret is corrosive, but one of the things it does not touch is that afternoon, not ever. CHAPTER ONE I An Ocean of Women OIL ON CANVAS 52 x 48 INCHES My house is three miles south of town. There are forty acres of wheatgrass and sage, a ditch with a hedgerow of cottonwoods and willows, a small pond with a dock. The back fence gives on to the West Elk Mountains. Right there. They are rugged and they rise up just past the back of my place, from sage into juniper woods, then oak brush, then steep slopes of black timber, spruce and fir, and outcrops of rock and swaths of aspen clinging to the shoulders of the ridges. If I walk a few miles south, up around the flank of Mount Lamborn, I am in the Wilderness, which runs all the way to the Curecanti above Gunnison, and across to Crested Butte. From the little ramada I look south to all those mountains and east to the massif of Mount Gunnison. All rock and timber now in August. There's snow up there all but a few months a year. They tell me that some years the snow never vanishes. I'd like to see that. If I step out in front of the small house and look west it is softer and drier that direction: the gently stepping uplift of Black Mesa where the Black Canyon of the Gunnison River cuts through; other desert mesas; the Uncompahgre Plateau out beyond it all, hazy and blue. This is my new home. It's kind of overwhelming how beautiful. And little Paonia, funny name for a village out here, some old misspelling of Peony. Nestled down in all this high rough country like a train set. The North Fork of the Gunnison runs through it, a winding of giant leafy cottonwoods and orchards, farms, vineyards. A good place I guess to make a field of peace, to gather and breathe. Thing is I don't feel like just breathing. Sofia pulls up in the Subaru she calls Triceratops. It's that old. I can hear the rusted out muffler up on the county road, caterwauling like a Harley, hear the drop in tone as it turns down the steep gravel driveway. The downshift in the dip and dinosaur roar as it climbs again to the house. Makes every entrance very dramatic, which she is. She is twenty-eight. An age of drama. She reminds me of a chicken in the way she is top-heavy, looks like she should topple over. I mean her trim body is small enough to support breasts the size of tangerines and she is grapefruit. It is not that she is out of proportion, it's exaggerated proportion which I guess fascinates me. I asked her to model for me five minutes after meeting her. That was about three months ago. We were standing in line in the tiny hippy coffee shop--Blue Moon, what else?--the only place in town with an espresso machine. She was wearing a short knit top and she had strong arms, scarred along the forearms the way someone who has worked outside is scarred, and a slightly crooked nose, somehow Latin. She looked like a fighter, like me. Sofia noticed the paint splattered on my cap, hands, khaki pants. "Artist," she said. It wasn't a question. Her brown eyes which were flecked with green roved over my head, clothes, and I realized she was cataloguing the colors in the spatters. "Exuberant," she said. "Primitive. Outsider--in quotes." "You're kidding." "I went to RISD for a year but dropped out." Then her eyes went to the flies stuck in the cap. "Artist fisherman," she said. "Cool." She asked how long I'd been here, I said two weeks, she said, "Welcome. Sofia," and stuck out her hand. I said I needed models. She cocked her head and measured me with one eye. Held it way past politeness. "Nude?" "Sure." "How much?" Shrug. "Twenty bucks an hour?" "I'm trying to decide if you are a creep. You're not a violent felon are you?" "Yes. I am." A smile trembled across her face. "Really?" I nodded. "Wow. What'd you do?" "I shot a man in a bar. You're not going to back out the door like in a horror movie are you?" She laughed. "I was thinking about it." "My second wife did that when she found out." She was laughing uninhibited. People in line were smiling at her. "You're married?" "Not anymore. She ran off down the road." "I'll do it," she said. "For twenty-five. Danger pay." Took her a while to rein in her mirth. "Nude modeling for a violent killer convict. That is a first. Twenty-five, right?" I nodded. "I didn't kill the guy, I just shot him. I was a little high and to the left." She was laughing again and I knew that I had made a friend. Now she shoved open the door like she always did, like she was doing some SWAT breach entry. Tumbled into the room. "Morning." "Hey." "Your muffler is getting worse." "Really? Tops is balking at extinction. Poor guy." She sat on a stool at the long butcher block counter that separates the kitchen in this one big room. I pushed aside a bunch of sketch paper and charcoal and the fly-tying vise where I'd been tying up some Stegner Killers, invented by yours truly, which the trout couldn't seem to resist the past couple of weeks. I set a mug of coffee on the counter between us, poured myself another. "What are we doing today?" "An Ocean of Women. Something I've been thinking about." "An ocean? Just me?" "On my way up here from Santa Fe a good friend told me I can't always swim in an ocean of women. I saw it. Me swimming, all the women, the fish. I thought we could give it a try." "Forget it." I set down my mug. "Really? No?" "Just kidding. Fuck, Jim, you ask a lot of a girl." "Want an egg with chilies?" Shook her head. "You just have to make like an ocean. Just once." She cocked her head the way she does, fixed me with an eye. The light from the south windows brushed a peppering of faint acne pits on her temple and it somehow drew attention to the smoothness of her cheek and neck. "Stormy or calm?" she said. I shrugged. She leaned forward on the counter, her breasts roosting happily in her little button top. "How about choppy and disturbed? Dugar told me yesterday he wants to move to Big Sur." Dugar was her hippy boyfriend. "I'm like how fucking corny. Plus nobody lives there anymore, it's so damn expensive. He read a bunch of Henry Miller. Are you a teenager? I said. You like read a novel and want to move there?" She stuck out her mug and I refilled it. "It wasn't a novel it was a memoir, he says. Jeez. He says he is a poet but between you and me his poems are sophomoric. Lately, since he's read up on Big Sur, they are all about sea elephants which he has never seen. I have and they are not prepossessing, know what I mean? They would never even move if they didn't have to eat. I said there is no fucking way I'm moving to Big Sur with the sea elephants, or even the Castroville, which is like the closest place a normal person could afford to live. I mean, do you want to live in the artichoke capital of the world? Be grateful for what you've got right now, where you are right now. Then I unleash the twins." I am laughing now. "That's not fair, is it?" "Not by a long shot." "I'm young," she says. It's a simple statement, incontrovertible, and it stabs me with something like pain in the middle of my laughter. We begin. Sofia is a champ of an ocean, a natural. I paint fast. I paint her oceaning on her side, arched, facing and away from me, swimming down off a pile of pillows, breaststroke, on her back over the same pillows willowing backwards arms extended as if reaching after a brilliant fish. I paint the fish as big as she is, invoking him. More fish, a hungry dark shark swimming up from the gloom below with what looks like a dog's pink boner. The shark has a blue human eye, not devoid of embarrassment. I am lost. In the sea. I don't speak. Sofia has the rhythm of a dancer and she changes as she feels the mood change. I love this. I paint myself swimming. A big bearded man, beard going white--I'm forty-five and it's been salt and pepper since I was thirty. I'm clothed in denim shirt and khakis and boots, ungainly and hulking in this ocean of women, swimming for my life and somehow enjoying it. In my right hand is a fishing rod. It looks like the swimmer is doing too many things at once and this may be his downfall. Or maybe it's the root of his joy. My palette is a piece of covered fiberboard and I am swiping, touching, shuttling between it and canvas, stowing the small brush with a cocked little finger and reaching for the knife, all in time to her slowly shifting poses. I am a fish myself, making small darting turns against the slower background rhythms and sway of the swell. No thought, not once. Nothing I can remember. It is not a fugue state. I've heard artists talk about that like it's some kind of religious thing. For me it's the same as when I am having a good day fishing. I move up the creek, tie on flies, cast to the far bank, wade, throw into the edge of a pool, feel the hitch the tug of a strike bang!--all in a happy silence of mind. Quiet. The kind of quiet feeling that fills you all night as you ready the meal, steam the asparagus, pour the sparkling water and cut the limes. Fills you into the next day. I wouldn't call it divine. I think it's just showing up for once. Paying attention. I have heard artists say they are channeling God. You have to have a really good gallery to say that. I am painting now without naming any of it, can name it only in memory, and I become aware of a tickling on my neck. Sofia is leaning into me, standing on her tiptoes and watching over my shoulder. I turn my head so that my bearded chin is against her curly head. She is wearing the terry cloth robe she leaves here. She doesn't say a word. She is behind me, but I can feel her smile, a lifting and tautening of the pillow of her cheek against my chin. I was painting more fish, and women, and these crab-like things at the bottom that had men's eyes and reaching claws, and had somehow lost the fact that my model had vanished in the tumult. "It's been three hours," she whispers. "I'm gonna go." I nod. She tugs my beard once and is gone. Somewhere in there among the ocean of women and the darting fish and a man happily lost at sea I hear wind over water and a heart breaking like crockery and the bleating roar of a retreating dinosaur. II I came to the valley to paint. That was four months ago and I am painting, finally. I came up from Taos which is getting more crowded and pretentious by the minute. I was looking to find a place that was drama free. I am pretty good, somewhat famous, which means it gets harder to be quiet. A quiet place. There are two books about me. One I admit was commissioned years ago by Steve, my dealer in Santa Fe, as a way to boost my cachet, and it worked: prices for the paintings almost doubled. That's when I traded in my used van, the one with the satellite Off switch that the collection agency in Santa Fe could activate if I missed a payment. Leaving me stranded by the side of the empty desert highway. The other book is a fine and true scholarly study of what the author calls a Great American Southwest Post-Expressionist Naïf. I've been called a lot of things, but naïve was never one of them. It must have been because I couldn't stop painting chickens. Farmyard chickens in every frame: landscapes, adobe houses, coal trains, even nudes. There was a chicken. They make me laugh, their jaunty shape all out of balance--like a boat that was built by a savant boat maker, you know it shouldn't float but the fucker does. That's chickens. Naïf. Excerpted from The Painter by Peter Heller All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
