BOOK REVIEW: The Painter by Peter Heller

I’m a sucker for books about art and books that somehow capture the splendor of nature. Peter Heller’s The Painter wins on both counts, with the added attraction of a stark, precise prose that deftly renders complex emotions, the joy and grief of the human condition. In many ways, I am reminded of the works by Richard Wagamese I’ve read recently, blended with A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean.

Jim Stegner is a complex man, raised in the Pacific Northwest in a logging family. After his father’s death and finding his mother in bed with his father’s foreman, Jim runs away from home. When he stumbles into a San Francisco art museum, flabbergasted by paintings, this young man decides to become an artist. Haunted by his mother’s death before he could tell her he loved her and forgave her and by the violent death of his teenaged daughter, who he yelled at when she tries to confide in him about her first love, a young drug user.

Jim finds peace in painting and in fly fishing, seeking those moments in both where time and the world slip away and where he’s left in a kind of ecstasy, where he can “feel a cooling, the calmness of craft, of being a journeyman who focuses on the simple task.” Yet a darkness dwells within him. At times he loses control of his emotions and his fists, causing him to spend time in jail. When he loses control again, defending a horse from a man beating it, tension mounts in his life, precipitating further loss of control—and bringing a newfound verve to his paintings that send the prices his dealer gets for them into the ozone. Overall, The Painter is a book about a brilliant artist and emotionally tortured man on a quest for redemption. This book hits the shelves of my permanent collection.

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The Painter (Knopf, May 6, 2014) is available through:

Amazon | Barnes & Noble

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You can read my reviews of Richard Wagamese’s books here: