Review: The Lost Van Gogh

 The Lost Van Gogh is a combination art history lesson and roller coaster. It’s not aspoiler to tell you that it’s about a lost van Gogh that’s found and then lost again and everyone in this tale is trying to find it, each with their own agenda. Nobody is who they pretend to be, and everyone has enough secret baggage to send a 747 plunging to its watery grave. The effect steers awfully close to the comic, but luckily we’re in the hands of a skilled driver.

     A New York girl buys an old painting in a second-hand store upstate. Her boyfriend, an up-and-coming young painter, discovers there’s more to this painting than meets the eye. They make a big mistake: they tell somebody. Just a handful of people, really. But every single person they tell, they shouldn’t have.

     This story is marinated in the New York art world, seasoned with Amsterdam, and served up fittingly enough, in the little French village of Auvers-sur-Oise, where van Gogh drew his last breath—and he’s not the only one to die there for his art.

       Jonathan Santlofer is a rare bird, an author who’s also a painter in his own right, which makes him eminently qualified to pen this tale. (As the author of a mystery title involving van Gogh myself), I was impressed. You will be, too.

All fiction is historical

 

I have slowly come to the understanding that all fiction is historical fiction in that each character must be placed within their own historical context which, unless all the characters are the same age as the writer, means that every character must come equipped with his own set of historical markers, which may influence his outlook and behavior.

 For instance, in my work in progress, my antagonist is 52, my protagonist 36, and my second lead 28. If my story take place in 2023, that means they were born in 1970, 1986, and 1994 respectively. For each of them, any date before those are closed books, experientially speaking. They have no memories of anything that came before. 

Of course they have access to a wealth of historical information that they can draw on all the way back to the big bang, but they weren’t there at the big bang, and that makes a huge difference. I am 65 in 2023, which gives me a frame of reference which extends back further than my youngest character by nearly 40 years. When seeing the world through her eyes I must see it with one eye closed, so to speak.

And of course their years of birth are hopeless when imaging their frames. What do you remember from the year of your birth? Probably nothing. My first memory is from the age of 3, and a very imperfect memory it is. If we take an arbitrary age of say, ten, we are just beginning to come to grips with the world beyond the schoolyard gate. 

So none of my characters are likely to remember a president before Reagan or a time before personal computers. My youngest character’s earliest memory is Y2k. She won’t really recall a time before Facebook. The U.S. will have been at war in Afghanistan most of her life. My protagonist would have had the word “Whitewater” burned into his brain at an impressionable age. He would never hear Carl Sagan or Tiny Tim—especially not on Johnny Carson. 

 None of them would know the USSR, Nixon, the Vietnam War, or the Beatles on a first-hand basis. All of them would have known Queen Elizabeth II and Cookie Monster.

 It’s like Steely Dan’s complaint in the song “Hey, Nineteen,” in which an aging hipster laments of his teen-age date:

Hey, nineteen,

That's 'Retha Franklin,

She don't remember the Queen of Soul.

                                           (You do remember Steely Dan, don't you?)

We’re each speaking a different language, based on experience. Of course, this could be carried further, since no two people, even identical twins, have exactly the same set of experiences, or the same reactions to them. And we can define our characters as precisely (or as generally) as we think necessary. But each of us is caged, to some extent, by the frameset of our lives. That’s a good place for a writer to begin understanding his characters.

Review: Secrets and Spies

Let’s start off the month with a review of Secrets and Spies, the newest installation in Trish MacEnulty’s Delafield&Malloy Historical mystery series:

 

The most entertaining part of the Delafield & Malloy historical mystery series is the sleight-of-hand the author uses to place her sleuths at the center of historical events. Some historical writers use a crowbar; Trish MacEnulty uses a scalpel.

The setting this time is 1915. America has not yet formally entered the war, but it’s hinted that American ships are secretly supplying the British, who are desperate for succor. New York City is full of clandestine agents for both sides, jockeying for position. Society writer Louisa Delafield is contemplating an offer of marriage. Her assistant Ellen Malloy is about to cross the sea to Ireland, where her father is on the edge of death. The ship she’s booked on is called the Lusitania. It’s the fate of that ship which will turn them both into double agents working for both the British and the Germans.

There’s no rah-rah cheering in this book. There are villains and victims on both sides (on all three sides, we’re privy through Ellen to the attempts of the Irish to get out from under the British yoke; they’re not afraid of skullduggery to achieve their aims.). It’s a layered, considered view that we’re presented with, which makes for a rich narrative, allowing MacEnulty to give voice to everyone from Jane Hull to Sir Roger Casement. And these momentous happenings will overturn Louisa and Ellen’s private lives profoundly. Some of the regular characters we’ve come to depend on may not survive; it’s war after all, even if it’s undeclared.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s excitement aplenty, treachery at every turn, and courage in great measure, as we’ve come to expect from Delafield and Malloy. I look forward eagerly to the next installment.

Review: The Orchid Hour

The Orchid Hour reeks, but in the best possible way. It reeks with the smell of lasagna in Little Italy, the smell of cheap gin in a 1920s speakeasy, and most importantly and most delicately with the scent of orchids at midnight. It reeks of sleazy dodges, flimsy aliases, and multiple murders.The Orchid Hour masquerades as a murder mystery, and it’s satisfying at that level, but underneath that layer, there’s another that’s a love story, and when all those layers are peeled away, it’s a coming-of-age story.

But our hero isn’t a child, not even a teen-ager. She's an Italian-American widow and mother who’s nearly thirty, in a time (not so long ago) when a woman was supposed to have no desires of her own, but only the family’s. When a girl had no girlhood, and a woman was defined only by her place in the family.
That’s where we find Zia de Luca at the opening of the novel, working at her day job at the library, her hair done up in a bun, wearing sensible shoes, going home to do the books for her father-in-law’s cheese shop and looking after her eight-year-old son.
But the first murder puts paid to that, and the second murder sets Zia on the path of vengeance, a path to New York’s nascent criminal under-world, and a path to self-discovery and self-transformation. To a time which will only last as long as the vagrant scent of the orchid, but a time which will change her life forever.

Told not only through Zia’s eyes, but that of the NYPD officer who tries his best to help her and a gangster who sees murder as a simple career opportunity, this novel encompasses New York, 1923 in all its glory and grime, from City Hall to Little Italy, from Greenwich Village to the Great White Way. Thanks to Bilyeu’s masterful hand, we step out into the wilds of New York with Zia. Maybe we’ll find love. Maybe we’ll find ourselves, by being taken out of ourselves.

This is Nancy Bilyeau’s eighth book, her best by far, and she’d already set a high bar. What are you waiting for? Pick it up now.