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Summary
Summary
A powerful and heartbreaking novel that chronicles the epic story of two families, two sons, and two marriages What I Loved begins in New York in 1975, when art historian Leo Hertzberg discovers an extraordinary painting by an unknown artist in a SoHo gallery. He buys the work; tracks down the artist, Bill Wechsler; and the two men embark on a life-long friendship.Leo's story, which spans twenty-five years, follows the evolution of the growing involvement between his family and Bill's-an intricate constellation of attachments that includes the two men; their wives, Erica and Violet; and their children, Matthew and Mark. The families live in the same building in New York, share a house in Vermont during the summer, keep up a lively exchange of thoughts and ideas, and find themselves permanently altered by one another. Over the years, they not only enjoy love but endure loss-in one case sudden, incapacitating loss; in another, a different kind, one that is hidden and slow-growing, and which insidiously erodes the fabric of their lives.Intimate in tone and seductive in its complexity, the novel moves seamlessly from inner worlds to outer worlds, from the deeply private to the public, from physical infirmity to cultural illness. Part family novel, part psychological thriller, What I Loved is a beautifully written exploration of love, loss, and betrayal-and of a man's attempt to make sense of the world and go on living.
Author Notes
Siri Hustvedt is the author of two previous novels, The Blindfold and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (0-8050-5590-8). She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Paul Auster.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The ardent exchange of ideas underlies all manner of passionate action in Hustvedt's third novel (after The Enchantment of Lily Dahl), a dark tale of two intertwined New York families. "What is memory's perspective? Does the man revise the boy's view or is the imprint relatively static, a vestige of what was once intimately known?" So muses Columbia University art historian Leo Hertzberg as he recalls the love affair between artist Bill ("Seeing is flux") Wechsler and his model/second wife, Violet, whom Leo secretly loves almost as much as his own wife, Erica. Leo and Bill become friends when Leo buys a huge portrait of Violet, the first painting Bill has ever sold, and the two are inseparable ever after. Erica and Bill's first wife, Lucille, give birth to sons in the same year and, soon afterward, the Wechslers buy a loft in the same SoHo building. When the boys are four, Bill and Lucille are divorced, and Bill marries Violet. Linked by their love of art and language (Erica is an English professor and Violet a Ph.D. student with a specialty in 19th-century forms of madness), the two couples talk insatiably about art and life, celebrating triumphs and weathering tragedy together. In its second half, the novel shifts into the terrain of the psychological thriller, as Bill and Lucille's son, Mark, a dangerously charming boy, grows up and slips into a sinister New York club scene. So solid and complex are Hustvedt's characters that the change in pace is effortlessly effected-the plot developments are the natural extension of the author's meticulous examination of relationships and motives. In considering Violet, Leo observes, "Unlike most intellectuals, [she] didn't distinguish between the cerebral and the physical." The same distinctions are blurred in this gripping, seductive novel, a breakout work for Hustvedt. Author tour. (Mar. 6) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
In her third novel, Hustvedt, a sophisticated and alluring writer drawn to the psyche's most convoluted passageways, co-opts New York's competitive and faddish art world for its symbol-laden milieu. Leo Hertzberg, a thoughtful art historian, narrates a measured and mesmerizing tale of passion and tragedy that spans 20 years and involves his wife, Erica, a literary scholar; his close friendship with highly provocative painter Bill Wechsler; and his hidden infatuation with Bill's sexy muse and second wife, Violet, an expert in psychotic disorders associated with women's body images, from nineteenth-century hysterics to contemporary anorexics. The two couples become thickly entwined, and their two sons, Leo and Erica's artistically inclined Matthew, and Mark, the strangely chimerical offspring of Bill and his morbid first wife, seem like brothers. Hustvedt has Leo dwell at length on the quartet's creative pursuits, which enables her to construct a disturbing lexicon of erotic obsessions and intimations of violence as her labyrinthine tale undulates its unnerving way toward abrupt deaths, prolonged grief, and teenage Mark's increasingly inexplicable behavior. By wedding the ordinary torments of family life with the heightened sensibilities of artists and a criminal grotesqueness, Hustvedt ponders the dark side of inheritance and creativity and the crushing burdens of love. Donna Seaman
Guardian Review
Siri Hustvedt's first two novels impressed me with their sizzling New York sophistication and sense of urban metaphor and magic. I didn't quite grasp what they were supposed to be about -neither, you suspected, did she - but I was very beguiled by this fresh, cool voice, with its slightly wacky but insistent frankness. But both novels were, in their way, slight, which is not a comment you could make about this, her third. At almost 400 pages, it has none of the fey, hip, blink-and-you'll-miss-it quality of the other two. Not that it isn't hip - it is. You feel that Hustvedt can't help but use words with style and verve. The New York that oozes from her pages is dazzling, sexy, darkly lit. But this is also a big, wide, sensuous novel - clever, sinister, yet attractively real. It lives and breathes and never apologises for itself. It's the novel she deserved to write next and as such it represents a breakthrough. Leo is a middle-aged art critic who buys a painting that intrigues and disturbs him, and he soon becomes close to the experimental artist, Bill Wechsler. Bill is married to a poet, the emotionally fragile Lucille; Leo to an academic, the rather more down-to-earth Erica. Soon the four are great friends, living above each other in the same apartment block, talking about art and ideas, even having their sons - Mark and Matt - at roughly the same time. But as the years go by, Bill falls deeply in love with one of his models: Violet (the woman in the original painting). After much heart-searching and grief, he finally leaves Lucille and Mark to live with her. Violet - who is writing a dissertation about eating and hysteria in women - is kind, lively, beautiful and a loving stepmother. In fact when Lucille moves away and marries again, Mark and Violet form an even stronger bond. Then the two boys go off to summer camp together where Leo and Erica's son Matt, now aged 11, drowns. Leo and Erica are so shaken by the tragedy, so inconsolable, that eventually their own marriage falters. This is every bit as tragic as it sounds. It isn't that they don't still love each other, just that they are too numbed and stupefied with grief to make the active decision to stick together. As the years pass and Erica finally moves to another city, Leo's relationship with Bill's son Mark becomes more urgent and important to him and so, eventually, does his relationship with the emotionally generous and uninhibited Violet. I won't unravel the story any further than that, except to say that it's far more tangled than I can properly convey here and that it covers long, intensely eventful years of these people's lives. And this isn't just a tale of families, either. It's a genuinely disturbing urban thriller - there's violence, duplicity, murder and erotica - but it's also satisfyingly weighed down with the heft of marital and parental relationships and, maybe most importantly, with a profound and intelligent dialogue about love. Most impressively of all perhaps, Hustvedt takes us deeply and convincingly into the psyches of all of these people, not only exploring what makes them tick emotionally (plenty of good writers can do that) but also dissecting the very impulse that makes them into artists and thinkers (far harder and rarer). In fact she writes with astonishing daring and clarity about the artistic spark itself, the desire to search for meaning where there seems to be none, the need to create questions, even when there can probably be no answers. As a result, the intricacies of the relationships she depicts, the fragile sexual landscapes -whether comic and wobbly or romantically sweeping - snag at your heart. The descriptions of Bill's paintings and sculptures (endless and astoundingly detailed) are done with real conviction and never for one moment seem tedious or superfluous. But when he abandons his lover to give life with his wife and child one more try, and Violet writes him a series of hypnotic and deliberate letters cataloguing the sheer vitality and urgency of her desire for him, the effect is all the more intense for the glimpse it affords us of Bill the lover, the physical man. "'I think about your thighs,' she writes in the second letter, 'and the warm moist smell of your skin in the morning . . .' " (It works. He returns to her on the fifth day.) Hustvedt's real achievement is to push the boundaries of the novel further, by making something of such sheer, daunting and inspiring largeness. I can't remember the last time I finished a novel and truly believed I'd absorbed the taste and span of an artist's career as well as the pains and joys of 30 years of his sexual and emotional life, but this one convinced me I had. Julie Myerson's latest novel, Something Might Happen , is published by Cape in June. To order What I Loved for pounds 12.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-siri.1 As the years go by, [Bill Wechsler] falls deeply in love with one of his models: Violet (the woman in the original painting). After much heart-searching and grief, he finally leaves [Lucille] and [Mark] to live with her. Violet - who is writing a dissertation about eating and hysteria in women - is kind, lively, beautiful and a loving stepmother. In fact when Lucille moves away and marries again, Mark and Violet form an even stronger bond. Then the two boys go off to summer camp together where [Leo] and [Erica]'s son [Matt], now aged 11, drowns. As a result, the intricacies of the relationships she depicts, the fragile sexual landscapes -whether comic and wobbly or romantically sweeping - snag at your heart. The descriptions of Bill's paintings and sculptures (endless and astoundingly detailed) are done with real conviction and never for one moment seem tedious or superfluous. But when he abandons his lover to give life with his wife and child one more try, and Violet writes him a series of hypnotic and deliberate letters cataloguing the sheer vitality and urgency of her desire for him, the effect is all the more intense for the glimpse it affords us of Bill the lover, the physical man. "'I think about your thighs,' she writes in the second letter, 'and the warm moist smell of your skin in the morning . . .' " (It works. He returns to her on the fifth day.) - Julie Myerson.
Library Journal Review
Art historian Leo Hertzberg happens upon an extraordinary painting in New York City in 1975. When he tracks down the artist, Bill Weschler, the two become such dear friends that they end up blending their small families into one tight unit of shared milestones and close living quarters. For years, the men and their accomplished wives and bright young sons flow in and out of each other's lives until a numbing tragedy destroys the infrastructure. As they struggle to regain some sort of professional and personal equilibrium, the adults are faced with another impossible blow when the surviving child, dangerously and bafflingly defiant, engages in ever more frightening behavior. Parents can lose their children in all sorts of ways, and when they do, their lives forever revolve around that fatality. Hustvedt (The Enchantment of Lily Dahl) beautifully captures the devastation of such loss as she immerses the reader in the lives of two families who, hobbled by their shared wounds, desperately search for salvation in the accomplished world of art and intellectual brilliance in New York City. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/02; Hustvedt is novelist Paul Auster's wife.-Ed.]-Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
From What I Loved :Yesterday, I found Violet's letters to Bill. They were hidden between the pages of one of his books and came tumbling out and fell to the floor. I had known about the letters for years, but neither Bill nor Violet had ever told me what was in them. What they did tell me was that minutes after reading the fifth and last letter, Bill changed his mind about his marriage to Lucille, walked out the door of the building on Greene Street, and headed straight for Violet's apartment in the East Village. When I held the letters in my hands, I felt they had the uncanny weight of things enchanted by stories that are told and retold and then told again. My eyes are bad now, and it took me a long time to read them, but in the end I managed to make out every word. When I put the letters down, I knew that I would start writing this book today. Excerpted from What I Loved: A Novel by Siri Hustvedt 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.
