Authenticity.

Deirdre Madden (paper, 362 pages, Graywolf Press, 2005; $15)

Who among us has not exhibited our paintings on a freezer-door gallery? My finger-paint masterpieces, like yours, were slung once at odd angles, attached loosely with a complementary magnet from Wisconsin Public Service, juxtaposed to grocery lists and outdated photographs of my cousins.At such a young age, I did not yet consider the implications of my so-called art work on display. When in sixth grade, I brought home an etching of tropical fish, however, I knew enough to be embarrassed that my grandma paid hundreds of dollars to have it framed. Better yet, I can name the color of embarrassment I flushed this summer when my aunt, on a characteristic cleaning-out of my grandma’s house, opted for my abomination of art over the Victrola phonograph.

Perhaps I was already wishing, without having met painter Roderic Kennedy in the pages of Deidre Madden’s novel Authenticity, that I was his teenaged half-Italian, half-Irish daughter Allegra, and that he were my father—an artist. I was wishing he would instruct me like so:

“Would you like to show me the work you have in your folder?”

They were every bit as bad as he had feared they might be. The first was a seascape in which neither the sky nor the sea had in it anything of air or water’s elemental clarity and lightness. Instead, there were opaque waves of dense pigment and heavily impastoed clouds. The next painting, a portrait, and the one after that of a brown puppy were, if anything, worse.

“They’re not very good, I know.”

Roderic tried to find a diplomatic way to frame his criticisms.

“I think you need to go back to first principles. You need to work on your drawing skills.”

“Will you show me how?”

From the bathroom he fetched a drinking glass, half filled it with water from a plastic bottle on the bedside table, then placed both bottle and glass on a dresser together with a second empty glass tipped on its side. There was a pencil beside the telephone and some sheets of paper printed with the crest of the hotel. “Try to work towards something fluid and relaxed. You need to look properly at what’s before you,” he said.

Before long, they both became, as Madden describes, wholly absorbed in the project. Madden does not merely send us longing for parents who might have been honest with us, or for parents who might, at least, have been shrewd enough to notice our shortcomings before treating us superficially and obliviously as accomplished artists, however. Roderic, after all, took to drink, and neglected, then lost his wife and three daughters. If Roderic were both a gifted artist and a perfect father, Madden would not have a story.

And if readers long for a father such as Roderic, what then will they make of fellow artist Julia Fitzpatrick’s father Dan. “I do not understand art,” he says to Roderic when they first meet. Madden writes, “It was not a critical or defensive remark, he was simply stating a fact.” Yet, Julia herself considers her father a kind of artist as she explains to Roderic in one of their many dialogues on the topic:

“Take my father. I was out for a walk with him a while back and he pointed out to me a little tree that was growing in a clump of wild yellow irises. There was something about the relationship between the two—the fragility of the tree, the sense of multitude the flowers gave, yellow, green, that whole think moving in the wind, it was alive. I can’t explain. But it was for just that moment, that particular moment when my father noticed it, because I passed the same spot a week later and it looked quite nondescript. It was just, you know a tree.”

“And that makes him an artist?”

“In my book, yes.”

No character in this novel is free from having to answer questions about art or from having to reconcile their identity as artists, non-artists. What constitutes art? Has art taken the place of religion? To what extent is function attached to the validity of art? Has art become something other than what it once was? What is the consequence of denying within ourselves the desire or the drive to become artists? William Armstrong, a depressed middle-aged business man, who becomes enmeshed in Julia’s life, takes a nine-month hiatus from his work to paint. His son Gregory studies the very art books in William’s library that William never studied closely enough himself. Even William’s wife, Liz, whom we meet only briefly, has designed a bedroom in their home as a replica of the quarters where she once stayed while visiting her grandmother on a farm in county Roscommon. Madden writes:

Corncrakes at dusk, the smell of the hen house, the stiff white wing with which her grandmother brushed flour from the griddle, the printed roses of the cheap wallpaper: all of this lost world she could re-enter by sitting quietly alone in the room she’d created.

And no genuine inquiry about art is free from the knots of memory. Julia herself spends the novel dwelling upon the process of creating an exhibit based upon sensual memory—the power of scents to unearth past memories, the power of hot chocolate, clean linen, hay, rotting apples, cut grass, turf smoke, or fresh bread. Fragmented visual memories of her deceased mother are particularly haunting to Julia, and it is not, until she makes peace with the disjointed nature of these memories that she fully understands her art and fully accepts her love for Roderic, who is, ultimately a father figure, if not the perfect father. To Julia, he says, “You can’t see me, but thou recognise me. You do know it’s me. Do you realise what I’m getting at?” We need not see to know, yet another idea to contemplate about life and art. To his own daughter, he says, much earlier, though the advice resonates throughout every page thereafter. “You shouldn’t be saying ‘I want to be a painter,’ but rather ‘I want to paint.’ It’s something you do. That’s how you become it, by doing it.”

As writers, we need this reminder. If you want to write, write. As readers and book lovers, we too need the reminder. If you want love literature, read. And as people too—live, live, live authentically, a lesson that carries great weight in the final surprising and poignant pages of Madden’s novel.

Reviewed by Laura Jean Baker

Laura Jean Baker is a writer who lives in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Her story “Onaway Island” appeared in the Spring 2005 issue of Third Coast.