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LIVING
IN TWO DIFFERENT WORLDS
Fernanda Eberstadt has the democratic eye of a satirist (everyone
is fair game), but in her most recent novel, The Sons of Heaven
Meet the Daughters of the Earth, she's also mainly large-hearted
toward her many characters, even as she mocks them for their
illusions and fits of pique. The novel's title is also a paraphrase
of its story. The son of Heaven is Isaac Hooker, a Harvard
wunderkind from small-town New Hampshire who metamorphoses
into a visionary painter, a William Blake of the Hell's Kitchen
district of Manhattan. And the daughter of the Earth is Dolly
Gebler, a soulful New York patron of the arts. One of the
hard-working rich, she comes from Old Money and keeps to a
punishing schedule of good works (committee meetings in the
mornings, gallery openings at night), all in the service of
her conviction that art can change the world. But at home
she lives uneasily with her husband Alfred, their three children,
and an assortment of maids in a shabbily grand apartment overlooking
the Hudson.
Dolly gets testy with Isaac and begins to drop in at his loft
with picnics. (The first hamper contains enough food to last
him a week: a side of smoked salmon, a loaf of black bread,
a wheel of Brie.) And when Isaac needs a live model--"a
buxom one," for the shepherdess in his paintings, the
reader can't help but be struck by how well the stout but
voluptuous Dolly fits the job description. But how can their
love affair happen? They live in different worlds and come
from almost different generations and they are bashful.
Isaac
is in the habit of walking to Central Park in order to draw
oak and plane trees as they emerge "from the heavy grey
shadow of dawn--like the way you see cows sometimes looming
in a field in the morning dark--surprised, comfortable."
He's teaching himself to draw, "moving from scratchy,
crabbed, overworked, to loose and fluid as a skater's glide."
When Dolly asks him if he's drawing from nature, he says he
is, but that it's "nature, New York City-style. Rats
posing as sheep and crack dealers as shepherdesses. I go to
Central Park weekend mornings, up by the Ramble where it's
wild."
Dolly
tells him that Central Park is where she goes, too--for her
early morning walks, and she is soon making a detour up to
the Ramble to find Isaac scribbling under a tree, so cold
that even his pencil's got "chilblains." They go
off to a cafe called The Nectar for pancakes and coffee. And
so begins their doomed romance, more intriguing by far than
the more hackneyed affair Alfred is conducting with a young
painter who teaches art to women prisoners on Rikers Island.
But then Dolly and Isaac are idealists, while Alfred is a
realist who believes that a society must choose between freedom
and equality, and that to subscribe to the French Revolution's
ideal of "liberty, equality, fraternity" is as idiotic
as saying that water should be, all at the same time, "hot,
cold, lukewarm".
The
Geblers own a farm on Long Island (Goose Neck Farm), and Dolly
instals Isaac in this rural idyll in early spring, before
her family makes its summer trek to the country. As he commandeers
the children's icy playroom, he feels he's in paradise, his
solitude a "blessed conjunction of space, light, air,
birds, trees. He doesn't even feel chilly; the physical exercise
of painting--"the pugilistic pounce, thrust, dance of
it"--keeps him warm all day.
The
best parts of this book are the descriptions of paintings
and painting, of landscape, both urban and rural, and of the
rural within the urban (the Ramble and the Sheep Meadow in
Central Park). Eberstadt can also be wonderfully scathing
about the silliness of much of the New York art scene and
she does a brilliant spoof of contemporary art criticism when
she describes Isaac reading a review of his first one-man
show: "The primal encounter in Hooker's Old Testament
narratives, with their smeared and saturated iconography of
transgression and redemption is that of the post-exilic urbanite
grappling toward a Hegelian metatextuality, objectifying the
dialogic tension between exile and the possibility of eternal
recall while the seductiveness of his notched, crotchety surfaces
never altogether eliminates the underlying reminder that the
radical manufacture of our "humanness" demands a
certain decorative distancing--decor as decorum." ("Man,"says
Isaac's friend, Casey, "I think this Spicer wants to
get his hot little paws on your seductively notched crotch,
guy, and maybe even--how does he put it?--do a little fancy
transgression. Hey, this is a rave review, Hooker.")
When
a novel of ideas is as lively as this novel is, it's easy
to forgive it its flaws, the chief one being Eberstadt's tendency
to alter the form of address for her characters. Within a
single chapter (and sometimes even on a single page) Dolly
is "Mrs. Gebler", "Dolly Gebler", and
"Dolly". Alfred suffers a similar fate. Eberstadt
also occasionally too exactly reproduces the hesitancies of
daily speech. Apart from these minor glitches, the book is
amiable, untidy, bright and vital, and since it is, after
all, a satire, it quite naturally lacks the narrative power
of a tragedy. Only Dolly has an aura of the tragic about her,
since only Dolly has fallen utterly and needfully in love.
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