The intersection of creative endeavors with human relationships

books:


	• The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories Valerie Martin Vintage, 2006 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 6 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Needs to lighten up

These stories about writers and artists do not make the creative life sound attractive. Apart from rejected manuscripts and unsold paintings Martin's characters face many hazards. Even their cats are disaster-prone. As in her "Property" she seldom makes nice things happen to nice people. There are a lot of unpleasant deaths and one unhappy transmogrification. People jump out of windows, get trapped under cars, or die naturally and are found rotting. They inhabit New Orleans apartments without air conditioning in the summer or ones in Vermont without heat in the winter. "His Blue Period" was set in the same milieu as Tama Janowitz's wonderful "Slaves of New York."
I liked "Beethoven" and "The Open Door" best because, I think, the author eschews melodramatic devices and lets the action grow out of and define the character. She can be a witty and insightful writer when she lets cheerfulness creep in.

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The intersection of creative endeavors with human relationships

In captivating, precise, and sometimes lush prose, Martin examines the intersection of creative endeavors (poetry, painting, dancing, writing) with human relationships. Entirely entertaining and very insightful. Martin clearly speaks from experience. This is the best short story collection I've read in a long time. The first three stories in the collection are the best.

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Couldn't put it down!

On the one hand, I couldn't put this book down. Every story is complete--a novel in miniature. But then I realized I was going to finish the book and that maade me sad. In the end, I had to ration these stories out to myself, one a day, because I didn't want it to ever end.

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Beautifully written and moving

These short stories were wrought with great craftmanship, and they are extremely moving snapshots of the lives of artists and writers. The last two stories, in particular, about a couple on the verge of breaking up who travels to Rome, and about a husband's loving struggle to understand the changes his wife is going through, are fascinating and perceptive. I look forward to reading more of Valerie Martin's work.

Stories that continue to resonate in the memory

Valerie Martin's "Mary Reilly" reimagined "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" with such compelling intensity that new readers who sought out Stevenson afterwards might ask which is the real classic; and "Property" studied the corrosive effects of ownership on slave and slaveholder with a gaze more unflinching than most writers would care to attempt.

Set in recent times, "The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories" do not require, or permit, such stringency. One thinks of Henry James's tales of various artists, transposed to a wholly modern key: a painter who flees from a hapless love, and a lover who flees from a hapless painter---an actor who finds himself mortally upstaged by life---a poet who may lose her access to poetry if she relocates to remain with her partner. The present-day scenes of the sixty-two-page title story, set in a section of New Orleans that did not need Katrina to be desolate, possess the lurid lucidity of nightmare; and the concluding impasse---what to do with a manuscript one can neither read nor destroy---is resolved with a credibility that astonishes as it delights. Then, after so much tense and textural realism (many of these artists started out poor, or still are), in the final story the collection takes flight. At first "The Change" seems to refer merely to menopause, afflicting a printmaker who finds its effects anything but "mere"; but the alterations turn out to be much more drastic.

That we are being guided by a master story-teller is confirmed by the way the tales resonate in the memory long after a first reading: you go back to check this detail and that conversation and the quiet magic Martin works with words. This is a book for readers to revel in, and writers to learn from.

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reviews: page 1, 2

In this vital and heartbreaking collection of stories, Valerie Martin, the bestselling author of Mary Reilly and the internationally acclaimed Property, turns an unflinching eye upon artists?driven and blocked, desired and detested, infamous and sublime, as they struggle beneath the tyranny of Art to reconcile their audience with their muse.

A painter who owes his small success to a man he despises, discovers that his passivity has cost him the love that might have set him free. A writer of modest talents encounters the old love who once betrayed him; now she repels him, yet the unfinished novel she leaves in his hands may surpass anything he could ever produce himself. An American poet in Rome finds herself forced to choose between her lover and a world so alien it takes her voice away. A print maker, who has reached a certain age, enters so deeply into the magical world of her imagination that she can never find her way back. In captivating, luminous prose, Martin explores the trials and rewards of human relationships and creative endeavor with all the ease and insight of a writer at the top of her form.

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