Arts and Labor

Originally published in Time Out New York, May 11, 2006

Though the angst-filled artist is a familiar figure in literature and film, Valerie Martin doesn’t subscribe to the notion that all creative types are tortured souls. “I think some biographies of artists, especially of writers, tend to romanticize their subjects,” the author, who lives in Millbrook, New York, tells TONY. “Artists are often just ordinary people, sometimes fragile, sometimes egoists and sometimes sensible—they run the psychological gamut.” In her excellent new book, The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories, Martin delves into the lives of painters, novelists, actors and poets, focusing on the everyday sacrifices they make, and “their resolve to be an artist rather than, say, a banker or a jet pilot.” Mixing insight with imagination, the author, who also penned Mary Reilly and the Orange Prize–winning novel Property, breathes new life into the struggling-artist archetype.

Each story considers a different artistic what-if: What if a woman entrusted her unfinished novel to her ex-lover, an inferior writer, who must then decide whether to destroy the possibly brilliant manuscript or publish it? What if a married theater director accidentally seduced the dashing young lead in her production of Hamlet? The characters’ predicaments are consistently engaging, but The Unfinished Novel isn’t solely concerned with gripping plots; rather, it is Martin’s diligent attention to the day-to-day details of artists’ lives that makes each story an intensely colorful and textured microcosm.

One major problem that plagues Martin’s protagonists is their fear of selling out. In “Beethoven,” a painter living in New Orleans becomes depressed upon realizing that tourists pass on his good work but can’t get enough of his mediocre renderings of the dead composer. Other stories ponder the notion that success is often followed by complacency and a loss of integrity. In “His Blue Period,” the painter narrator viciously pinpoints the faults of his onetime comrade Meyer Anspach, whose growing popularity has led to a reluctance to chart new territory. “Like so many famous artists, these days Anspach does an excellent imitation of Anspach,” the narrator says of the artist’s predictable post-fame work.

Martin modeled The Unfinished Novel after Henry James’s The Figure in the Carpet, a collection of stories that put writers under the microscope. Like James, Martin is especially acute when detailing how seemingly minor decisions can radically affect one’s destiny. “His Blue Period” features a suicide that could have been avoided if a character had simply been more open about his feelings.

Many of the stories show how creativity, when taken to its extreme, can crowd out the possibility of love. “Artists have a reputation for being difficult to live with and for being destructive in relationships because everything must be sacrificed for the art,” the author says. And yet The Unfinished Novel is more interested in exploring these struggles than in condemning its characters to loneliness. In “The Open Door,” the poet Edith eventually realizes that her relationship with her lover, who wants to move to Italy, is worth more than her tenured university position, which has long allowed her to write. The story ends on a hopeful note, with the suggestion that great love can fuel great art, and vice versa.

Martin herself is clearly a believer in artistic expression—she toyed with the idea of being a painter and a musician before turning her attention to fiction. But she also believes that creative output should only be one facet of an artist’s experience. “The most important question to ask yourself is, Is art costing me my life? Writing, acting, painting—it ultimately should just be what you do, one part of who you are.” As a writer, she’s more interested in mulling over hardships than in experiencing them firsthand. “I like to read fiction that makes me think, Well, it’s really more complicated than I would have dreamed possible,” she says. “That’s the kind of story I try to write.” With The Unfinished Novel, she has once again succeeded—and with her integrity intact.