Review by New York Times 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."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 29, 2014]
Review by 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
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by 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.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by 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.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
