Reviews

The Flower to the Painter by Gary Inbinder

brynhammond's review

5.0

I’m attracted by the idea of creative pastiche, and I guess that’s what this novel is. I feel vaguely inadequate because I don’t know my Henry James or my Edith Wharton. Not that I felt I needed to, I hasten to say. I enjoyed this for its painters’ lives – if you like 19thC art – and for its story of a woman disguised as a man and the emotional and sexual misadventures this leads to. Her inclinations are to other women, while she herself has an uncanny resemblance to Donatello's David, that androgynous icon. Marcia/Mark isn’t an identity-figure for me – I imagine she isn’t meant to be – she starts off too cynical and street-wise for that, a girl without means, determined to survive and thrive, who happens to have a major talent, and might be at the forefront of the century’s artists. She does change through the story, though I mustn’t tell you how. She visits Italian cities, Paris and London – with her painterly eye - and the novel is in part a Grand Tour. It’s a gallery of artists and art-lovers and patrons, too; and a large aspect of the novel is about the intersection of art and finance. This challenges me (I’d be the art-for-art’s-sake type, exactly what Marcia doesn't intend to be) but it’s certainly a rich subject to pursue, and indeed a lesson to me.

The writing, I’d say, suits the subjects: at times lush and painterly, at times more in the key of the disenchanted social scenery.