The Marriage Artist: A Novel
*Starred Review* Art critic Daniel Lichtmann staked his career on an enigmatic Native American artist named Benjamin Wind, until Benjamin and Daniel’s wife, Aleksandra, a Russian Jew and intrepid photographer, fall to their deaths from the roof of Wind’s New York studio. Were they lovers? Did they make a suicide pact? Faced with this double jeopardy of grief and mystery, Daniel is impelled to search out the truth, a quest that unfolds in a double plot. Winer (The Color Midnight Made, 2002) follows Daniel on one track; on the other, he takes readers to Vienna circa 1928, where Josef, the son of assimilated Jews and a boy of prodigious artistic gifts, is put to work by his rascally grandfather painting illuminated ketubot, or marriage contracts. Cruel ironies accrue when Josef’s adoring friend Max arranges for the charismatic “marriage artist” to marry Hannah as part of a plan to escape the Nazi terror. As the two story lines converge, readers discern the central secret long before it’s revealed, and Winer’s prose flickers between ravishing and contrived. Yet structural flaws do not diminish the audacity and beauty of this elaborate psycho-political-sexual puzzle, with its hard truths, startling visions, and eerie insights into the mystical and memorializing powers of art, and that endless hunger we call love. --Donna Seaman