The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 24 April 2001
by Susan Vreeland
In this little novel, we get to witness the "life" of a painting purportedly by Jan Vermeer. It is a thing of beauty, a gem of light and color, hypnotic to view. The book opens around the present day, with one man's dark secret and his misguided attempt at redemption. Episodically, the book progresses back in time, through the painting's owners, and the subtle mystery of the artist. The tale moves back through wealth, poverty, disaster and tragedy, all the way back to a Dutch painter and his subject. The stories are often beautiful and emotional. They are sometimes only very loosely tied together (the book was assembled from different stories, some already published), and in a few of them, the painting is merely a background prop, which could have been anything. The structure of the book begs a comparison to E. Annie Proulx's Accordion Crimes which similarly follows the "life" of a made object (though forward in time). Vreeland manages an entertaining reverse narrative, but the common thread of the painting gets lost, and doesn't carry the strength of Proulx's accordion and her characters. The passion of art, the compulsion to beauty, that could tie the whole book together only shines through in a few places. Just a couple of the chapters in the life of the painting manage to bring this out with conviction. When she arrives there, however, Vreeland does a terrific job with the artist's passion. A pretty good, if uneven, book.