The Great Man
By Kate Christensen
Doubleday, 305 pages, $23.95
Abigail, the self-sacrificing widow of “the great man,” says he was ” ‘the most selfish man who ever lived.’ ” Oscar Feldman was a New York painter famous not for the truth or beauty of his art but for his allegiance to the female nude, his sole subject. He ” ‘was the biggest human baby in all of history,’ ” says Teddy, Oscar’s long-suffering mistress. ” ‘He couldn’t live without a woman around. . . . He saw women as the most powerful beings on earth.’ ” And women adored him. Oscar bedded as many as he painted, while lording it over his two households for years on end, woefully neglecting his children. Oscar’s sister Maxine, also a painter, condemns his work as ” ‘smutty.’ “
Why are these women disparaging the great man? Because five years after his death at 78, two biographers are stirring up memories, opening old wounds and threatening to expose secrets.
Nimble, witty and discerning, Kate Christensen is single-handedly reinvigorating the comedy of manners with her smart and disemboweling novels of misanthropes, cultural and aesthetic divides, private angst, social ambition and appetites run amok. It should come as no surprise that the author of “The Epicure’s Lament” delights in sensuality as both bane and boon. Or that she writes about the preparation and serving of food with pleasure and purpose.
In the opening scene of “The Great Man,” a shrewd and delectable novel of art and love, Claire St. Cloud, called Teddy by her intimates, creates a meal of savory complexity with all the strategy and combativeness of a general overseeing a military maneuver. Her guest is the first of Oscar’s rival biographers to cross her threshold. As covertly ferocious as a leopard in repose, Teddy watches him eat with rapacious attention and is not impressed with poor outgunned Henry Burke. His fellow biographer, Ralph Washington, doesn’t fare any better.
Teddy is a pistol, as they say, and so is each of the other women who survived their enthrallment to greedy and hedonistic Oscar. Svelte, stylish and tart-tongued, Teddy, who supported herself and her twins by working as a legal secretary, satisfied not only Oscar’s sexual hunger but, perhaps more importantly, his need for tough-minded intellectual banter. Teddy is instantly seductive. More subtle is the allure of soft and quiet Abigail, Oscar’s wronged wife who gave up every notion of independence to care for her and Oscar’s autistic son, Ethan, now 47 and still living at home. At first the reclusive widow, who would not let her philandering husband paint her, seems passive, sweet and dull, but gradually Abigail, whose patience with and love for locked-in-his-own-world Ethan is infinite, proves to be a woman of mettle, keen insight, humor and valor.
Under the onslaught of the boy biographers, Maxine (who has steadfastly avoided Teddy), and the entrenched enemies Teddy and Abigail, each emerge from a carapace of grief and resentment. As they dodge and feint to protect their privacy and conceal their feelings, Oscar’s women succeed in divining more hidden truths about their interlocutors than the biographers learn about them. So keenly choreographed are these sparring matches that the novel resembles a chess game, not only in terms of the characters’ scheming but also in the book’s striking motif of doublings and duelings between black and white.
The template for this black-white patterning is Oscar’s best-known work, a provocative diptych. “Helena” is a portrait of a white woman redolent of high-society money and privilege. “Mercy” is a portrait of a black woman (the model was Maribelle, Abigail’s housekeeper and best friend) whose stance suggests that of a nightclub singer. This iconic pair of opposites is what drew novice biographer Washington to Oscar’s work. He was a teenager when he first saw the paired paintings, and their raw power inspired him to attend art school. He is black; Burke is white. Burke’s first biography was of an obscure poet, whom Teddy believes would have been best left forgotten, and his approach to Oscar is more analytical than artist Washington’s — one might say more literary than visual. And Burke’s own life is growing more complicated than Washington’s. A bit like Oscar’s.
More pairs of opposites? Teddy’s twins embody divergent approaches to womanhood: Ruby is free-spirited, sexy and adventurous; Samantha is a harried stay-at-home mom with a wretchedly bossy husband. Lean and calculating Teddy has been best friends with curvaceous and serene Lila since college. Oscar and Maxine, the offspring of an Orthodox Jewish butcher, were both painters, and both loved women. But Maxine, the more classically trained and, many believe, the greater artist, abandoned figurative art for abstraction, painting strictly in (What else?) black and white. At 85, Maxine, who has never concealed the fact that she is a lesbian, is regretting her long, austere solitude and isolating devotion to her work. Brusque, thorny and gifted, she is also feeling remorse for her refusal to acknowledge her nieces. Clearly, now is the time for rapprochement. After all, Oscar’s women have long harbored a secret that, if revealed, will change art history.
Christensen is a writer of exceptional polish and keen intent, lacing her clever, well-designed plot with intriguing observations about the evolution (some might say devolution) of art, the inequities between men and women, and the insidiousness of racism. She also gleefully explodes ageist stereotypes in septuagenarian characters aglow with sexual passion and giddy with love.
This is a story about second, third, even fourth chances; the resiliency of friendship and family ties, and the confounding truth that no single portrait in image or word of any man or woman can ever be definitive.
We long to categorize things as black or white, but as Maxine knows, nothing is that simple. Not even black and white. In her paintings she uses ” ‘fifteen different blacks and seven different whites.’ ” Christensen’s palette is even richer in “The Great Man,” a penetrating novel and great fun from start to finish.
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Donna Seaman is an editor for Booklist, creator of the anthology “In Our Nature” and host for the radio program “Open Books” on WLUW 88.7 FM and www.openbooksradio.org. Her author interviews are collected in “Writers on the Air.”
