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rsadelleWhen I asked, both here and on Facebook, for lesbian fiction recs, Laurie King kept coming up as a suggestion. I don't read very many mysteries, although I read more when I was a teenager (my mother for a very long time read primarily mysteries with some literary fiction and poetry thrown in), but I was willing to give it a try.
The first two hundred pages of A Grave Talent are very good. It's an interesting mystery being worked on by interesting characters, primarily Kate Martinelli and Al Hawkins. The one quibble I have with that part of the book is that Kate's partner is referred to only by name - Lee - for 190 pages before King finally reveals that Lee is a woman. I find that kind of deliberate keeping the reader in the dark annoying, but I'm willing to let it pass in this instance since the book was written in 1993; I'm willing to accept that the world was a different place in the early 90s and this is one of the ways it was different.
I did not think as much of the next hundred and fifty pages. We find out who the murderer is on page 198, and the rest of the book is occupied with actually catching said criminal. But before we get to that, there is a whole bunch of artist as precious special snowflake nonsense, and yes, I do mean to be that derisive about it. The artist in question is Vaun Adams, aka the famous painter Eva Vaughn. Where it really lost me was when the therapist who can actually get through to Vaun explains her to Kate:
The best part of the second half of the book is what we find out about Lee's work, and I would read a book about that. Lee is a therapist who has discovered that she can work with (a) artists and (b) the dying, which of course leads her straight into the gay community. Remember that this is the pre-Rent era, when AIDS meant dying, not "living with disease." We also get to see into Lee's office where she has essentially two art therapy rooms. One is set up with paper, paints, drawing implements. The second has sand trays, which is where she starts with artists because "an artist is used to forming things into a visual expression, and it's not as likely to be therapeutic as the sand trays are. Here, where all the objects are already available, not waiting for manipulation, the unconscious is freed from aesthetic decisions and judgments and can just get on with telling its story through the choice and arrangement of figures and objects." Now, if you're going to go with philosophy about art and psychology, I want to see more of what Lee does, preferably with artists who are fully formed people.
All of that said, the mystery was very good, and I will probably read the next book.
The first two hundred pages of A Grave Talent are very good. It's an interesting mystery being worked on by interesting characters, primarily Kate Martinelli and Al Hawkins. The one quibble I have with that part of the book is that Kate's partner is referred to only by name - Lee - for 190 pages before King finally reveals that Lee is a woman. I find that kind of deliberate keeping the reader in the dark annoying, but I'm willing to let it pass in this instance since the book was written in 1993; I'm willing to accept that the world was a different place in the early 90s and this is one of the ways it was different.
I did not think as much of the next hundred and fifty pages. We find out who the murderer is on page 198, and the rest of the book is occupied with actually catching said criminal. But before we get to that, there is a whole bunch of artist as precious special snowflake nonsense, and yes, I do mean to be that derisive about it. The artist in question is Vaun Adams, aka the famous painter Eva Vaughn. Where it really lost me was when the therapist who can actually get through to Vaun explains her to Kate:
Vaun doesn't need to do anything deliberately to change people's lives. Perhaps a better image is that of a black hole, one of those things the astronomers love to speculate about, so massive they influence the motions of everything around them in space, so immensely powerful that light particles can't escape, so that they cannot even be seen except by inference, by reading the erratic movements of nearby planets and stars. Vaun passes by, utterly tied up with her own inner workings, and people begin to wobble. . . . And none of it deliberate. Vaun is as passive and as powerful as a force of nature. Her only deliberate actions are on canvas, and even then she would insist that there's no choice, only the recognition of what's needed next.Later, when Vaun tells Kate and Lee her story herself, she says, "I had carried the burden of this gift since I was two years old, and it had ruined my whole world." Now, I believe in the value of art, and one of the things I wished as I was reading the book was that Vaun were a real artist so I could look at the paintings King describes throughout the story, but this whole artist as special being thing doesn't work for me. First of all, I disagree with it. Artists are people, and whatever gifts they/we have are only a part of who they/we are. More importantly, it all means that Vaun never quite gets to be a real person. She's some paragon of an artist/angel and it makes it hard to care about her, or to understand why Kate and Lee want/choose to be her friends. She softens a little into the beginnings of a real person in the epilogue, but even then King is still setting her apart as something specialer than thou:
Before, Vaun's eyes had been so withdrawn as to appear dead and gave away no hint of the person behind them. They were no longer uninhabited; no longer did they appear to mirror the world without influence of the person. These eyes were clear, immediate, and revealing windows leading directly into a vivid person. Whatever else Andrew Lewis had done, he had stripped from Vaun her apartness, her defense. There was no hiding now, for this woman. She stood naked.This was almost too much to take from a novel that started out as a good, straightforward mystery.
The best part of the second half of the book is what we find out about Lee's work, and I would read a book about that. Lee is a therapist who has discovered that she can work with (a) artists and (b) the dying, which of course leads her straight into the gay community. Remember that this is the pre-Rent era, when AIDS meant dying, not "living with disease." We also get to see into Lee's office where she has essentially two art therapy rooms. One is set up with paper, paints, drawing implements. The second has sand trays, which is where she starts with artists because "an artist is used to forming things into a visual expression, and it's not as likely to be therapeutic as the sand trays are. Here, where all the objects are already available, not waiting for manipulation, the unconscious is freed from aesthetic decisions and judgments and can just get on with telling its story through the choice and arrangement of figures and objects." Now, if you're going to go with philosophy about art and psychology, I want to see more of what Lee does, preferably with artists who are fully formed people.
All of that said, the mystery was very good, and I will probably read the next book.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-20 07:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-20 04:20 pm (UTC)