THE PORTRAIT
By Iain Pears. Riverhead. 211 pp. $19.95
Scottish painter Henry MacAlpine is self-exiled on a remote island off Brittany. He accepts a commission from his old friend and adversary, eminent art critic William Nasmyth, to paint his portrait. Nasmyth sits for several days and does not utter a word (a marvelously inventive act of silencing a critic) as MacAlpine recounts an eventful life.
This, essentially, is the framework of Iain Pears's mesmerizing, if at times lugubrious novel The Portrait . But Pears, renowned author of the philosophical thriller An Instance of the Fingerpost , is a shrewd and masterful raconteur, and we are in for much more than a mortal reckoning between artist and critic (though we get that, too). This is a novel of pitiless revenge. ("A critic is to a painter as a eunuch is to a man.") MacAlpine's monologue posits that, given free rein, nostalgia eventually slips into retribution.
Under a seemingly endless barrage of indignities and grievances, what keeps Nasmyth in his chair? Most likely it is Mac- Alpine's intensity, his brutal candor, the way his memories accumulate into self-interrogation and his ability to communicate on many levels at once. It's a memorable performance, yet when MacAlpine finally insists that the critic -- the object of his disaffection -- accompany him to a wind-blown cliff at night, the reader gets a harrowing sense that Nasmyth will not live to remember it.
The backdrop of The Portrait is the thriving art scene in Paris and London when French Impressionists such as Matisse and Seurat were subverting received and comfortable notions of reality -- and becoming famous. During this period, MacAlpine labored away in poverty and confused obscurity, while Nasmyth's reputation rose. "We made it, you and I," says MacAlpine, acting as autobiographer and biographer. "You first, of course, with your wealthy wife, the books and articles, your place advising those American bankers, your trusteeships of museums, all the rest of it. But I, with my gruff Scottish manners convincing sitters they had an authentic artist on their hands, was on my way too."
Early on, MacAlpine admits, "You see, your very presence takes me back into the past and wakes up all sorts of memories I had forgotten about for years, which have not troubled me for a long time." This sentence alone suggests what a wonderfully unreliable narrator MacAlpine is; he has clearly been haunted by Nasmyth's betrayals for decades. And it's not exactly as if MacAlpine finally has someone to reminisce with, either. Rather, he seems like a man who has been talking to himself for years and now is talking to himself in front of someone. His prodigious holding forth as a creative act must provide the same sort of reprieve for MacAlpine that Joseph Conrad referred to when he said, "I wrote each of my novels so I could stop thinking about it."
There are stories within stories here, each with its own memorable twists and turns. MacAlpine recalls his almost sadistic destruction of the two women Nasmyth loved. And he confesses to painting a fraudulent Gauguin. "That painting," he says, "occupied a small place in your smoking room before you sold it to that American woman. I felt like telling you then, because you got a respectable sum for it and I felt I should have had a share. . . . My conscience is clear. In a museum now? Good heavens, how gratifying! I must write to them before I die, or better still, I will leave a note in my papers so that if someone ever writes a biography of me, the information will come out then."
All the humor in this clever first-person tour de force is sardonic. MacAlpine's intoxication with his own voice will exhaust some readers, but Pears demonstrates a high level of regard for just how much heartbreak, sour luck and spiritual depletion can be packed into a life. To his great credit, Pears -- an art historian in his own right -- does not allow his research to mitigate his fullest imagining of the lives of these antagonists. This is the skill that elevates erudition to art.
Then there is the portrait itself. After all, MacAlpine has been painting while doing all that talking. In part, MacAlpine describes it as the culmination of years of brooding: "Do you see the coldness I have put in around your eyes? The cruelty of the mouth, the calculation of the chin?" Nasmyth is probably not truly surprised by such dignified perversity. He would know that for centuries portraitists have mocked and revealed their subjects in encoded or blatant fashion. ("The background is entirely dark, for there has never been anyone in the world but yourself.") This novel, full of such emotional sabotage and honesty, seems dutifully straightforward, especially compared to the baroque intrigue of An Instance of the Fingerpost . It is nonetheless just as splendid an accomplishment. ·
Howard Norman's most recent book is the memoir "In Fond Remembrance of Me."
