Pictures at an Exhibition's Sparkling Surface
Sara Houghteling's Novel Has Some Missing Pieces
How’s this for a sparkling plot? Max Berenzon, the narrator of Sara Houghteling’s debut novel, Pictures At An Exhibition, recounts the stages of his early life culminating in a head-on collision with one of the lesser-known evils of the Nazi regime:
Confused by how his father, a Paris art dealer, forbids him from involvement in his family business, Max ends up in medical school. Then Paris falls to the Germans, and the Berenzon family goes into hiding. Upon their return to the city in 1944, they discover that their art collection, featuring priceless Matisses and Monets., have vanished. Max journeys around an unbalanced, corrupt, war-torn Paris in an effort to recover the paintings, and learns the truth behind a family secret.
Wilde At Heart
Here’s the bad news: Houghteling’s novel, like many published these days, comes armed with a scintillating framework, a healthy narrative drive, and little else to keep it continually alive in the reader’s mind, to the point where it can scarcely be called art.
Max’s voice feels real (not an easy feat), and the story he tells has the delicious clarity of a memoir written by a father bent on educating his sons and daughters about their family history. But just imagine being someone outside of that family reading the memoir and needing something to engage with besides a bare bones story.
Oscar Wilde figured out the problem more than a hundred years ago, as a debate raged about the nature of art, when he complained of novels “so lifelike that no one can possibly believe in their probability.”
Where Are The Role Models?
So what exactly is missing? The way Houghteling deals with the first-person narrative reveals age-old stylistic faults that threaten basically good novels with mediocrity. There’s no indication that she’s absorbed literary history and the potentialities of the novel form. More specifically, her method isn’t layered with any of the techniques that characterize classic or well-known contemporary first-person novels.
Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caulfield reminisce while still in the throes of adolescence, giving their voices an added poignancy and drama (how reliable are their perceptions of themselves and the world?) . In the case of Pictures At An Exhibtion, Max could have sounded like an older man who’s actively haunted by his past, rather than someone who’s simply recounting transpired events.
The narrator of Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm, for instance, speaks in a voice that’s emotionally charged, so that as he’s explicating what it was like growing up in the 1970s, he’s also suggesting what psychological effects that time still has on him. And in another stylistic marvel, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, the adult narrator recalls her and her sister’s ignorance of adult experience in a way that shatters the straightforward tone of a memoir into a thousand haunting pieces.
Other masterful contemporary examples: The wry, spirited narrator of A.L. Kennedy’s So I Am Glad, and the hypnotic intelligence of the narrator of Denis Johnson’s The Name Of The World.
Note To Publishers
O.K., so Houghteling may have had no pretensions to write a “literary” novel. But now more than ever, in a society threatened with bare bones Internet journalism and reality T.V., we need fiction writing that demonstrates the unique powers of this art form, beyond plot-making and straightforward narrative.
Title: Pictures At An Exhibition
Author: Sara Houghteling
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, February 2009, 256 pages, $24.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-26685-9
Sara Houghteling's Novel Pictures At An Exhibition
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