A Rake's Progress

A sexy but dissipated artist tries to make a comeback with a little help from his friends.

THE EDGE OF PLEASURE

A Novel

By Philippa Stockley

Harcourt. 325 pp. Paperback, $14

In this tart romance, British novelist Philippa Stockley stirs up a devilish brew of art and sex. Our stunningly handsome, narcissistic hero, Gilver Memmer, is a famous painter, fallen on hard times. London's golden boy by 28, Gilver has squandered his wealth and talent on lavish parties and frenzied sex; now, at 39, he hasn't painted much for 10 years and is almost broke.

His college roommate Harry, a gay decorator, finds him a dilapidated flat, and pretty Alice, a sub-editor at a newspaper whom he meets in the neighborhood, kindly helps him clean it. But Gilver is so monstrously self-absorbed that he forgets about Alice and spends the next two years in a drunken stupor. Alice and Harry, the novel's only likable characters, love Gilver for his good looks (now ravaged by alcohol) and magnetic personality, although they are smart enough to know they are being manipulated and used.

Enter Juliette, Alice's best friend, who coincidentally had known Gilver 15 years before and is set to destroy him. Juliette can be magnificently mischievous, ruthless and bullying, but even when we discover that as a young girl she was Gilver's victim, it's hard to feel sympathy for her. In fact, she and Gilver are both loathsome characters, but Stockley is nastier with Juliette, who, unlike our egocentric hero, is intentionally evil. Thankfully, Stockley raises questions of moral responsibility and doesn't let either of them off the hook.

A bruise on his model's rump from one of his rough sexual escapades inspires Gilver to paint his own disturbing version of Rembrandt's "Susanna." While Rembrandt shows Susanna happily bathing before the Elders try to rape her, Gilver paints her escaping from them, bruised and bloodied. His "Susanna" brings together the themes of art, sex and violence that run throughout The Edge of Pleasure . Gilver's art is so intertwined with sex that, Stockley writes, he revels "in his work with a sensual thrill that, wryly, he occasionally found indecent." There is definitely a whiff of indecency and raunchiness here.

What redeems and makes this depiction of London's shallow and sordid social world so entertaining is Stockley's biting wit and satirical eye. Her quip about London as "a play where all the dialogue had to be smart-edged, a little mean" describes her own prose. Harry hopes that Juliette "had nodded off or even died," and Alice thinks of her as "a manipulating cow." Stockley, a painter herself, mocks the art world's "inverted principle that no one believed you could be any good unless the price said so."

The allusion to Pride and Prejudice -- one of many playful references here -- seems odd, for Gilver is no Mr. Darcy. However, he is as handsome, egotistical and arrogant as Darcy; his redemption involves rejection, wounded pride and a glimpse of self-knowledge. This transformation (he quits drinking and paints work for a New York show in four months) is miraculously quick. Gilver realizes that previously "he had painted for the things it brought" and only now "because he must."

Scheming Juliette, an editor for the gossip magazine Rogue, publishes a vicious exposé, but I won't give away the ending, which ties together these loose ends in a romance fashion that does not completely work. Regardless, in this wickedly delightful but nasty concoction of sex, art and intrigue, Stockley takes us to the dark edges of pleasure. ·

Lelia Ruckenstein is a critic and the co-editor, with James A. O'Malley, of "Everything Irish."