Jim Stegner is a painter, rebellious son of a logger and a drunk, with his own struggles with alcohol and a hot temper. Jim’s agent and gallerist in Santa Fe, doing what he can to keep Jim painting, sends him to Paonia, Colorado, to a cabin outside town after release from several years in prison for shooting but not killing a man in a bar. The narrative is first-person – we have to take Jim’s word for his actions and accept his rationale – and in large degree he seems, or tries to be, as honest as possible. The book is situated in parts of Colorado I know well; it was a pleasure to have them so beautifully evoked. Heller is a fine writer.
Jim – I’ll call him Jim because everybody else does – loves to fly-fish. The shooting that landed him in prison was fallout from the murder of his seventeen-year-old daughter Alce and his subsequent divorce from her mother. Jim taught Alce to fly-fish, and that activity brings her back in ways that could heal his wounds. But arriving at a creek outside Paonia, he encounters an outfitter beating a horse with a club. Jim in a rage attacks the man, the sheriff is summoned, the injured horse is taken to recuperate. And Jim has made an enemy.
The story spins into a maelstrom of violence that overwhelms its homage to art. Since we see it all through Jim’s perspective, his choices feel consistent with who he is – but the sheriff’s warning early on, to live and let live, falls on deaf ears. Jim can’t, nor can those aligned against him. Meanwhile, as stories circulate and his notoriety grows, his paintings become darker, with violence lurking in the frame; the art connoisseurs of Santa Fe can’t buy them fast enough.
Jim’s creativity does get him out of jams – by behaving unpredictably, he survives encounters where he could easily end up dead. And his riffs on the creative process are fine: “Usually. It comes fast, it comes without thought, it comes like a horse running you over at night. But. Even if people understand this, they don’t understand that sometimes it is not like that at all. Because the process has always been: craft, years and years; then faith; then letting go.” But I confess to being disappointed that this tale about art turns noir. I didn’t need the focus on stalking, killers, and vengeance. And despite Jim’s self-image as a man with ordinary human struggles, his participation belies it.
Likely aware of how escalating violence can hijack a narrative, Heller regards it from a philosophic perspective, letting Jim steep in what he’s done – self-defense or not, prosecuted or not, he feels the stain on his soul, as he should. Heller humanizes the villains too, enough that the reader is not pleased to think of Jim as some Dirty Harry ridding the world of scum. In a society increasingly drawn to vigilantism and guns, this book fits right in – except the art, which doesn’t.
Late in the novel Jim reflects on a pair of paintings at the Tate Modern Museum in London, both striking him as powerfully sexy portrayals of women. The first, a detailed study of a pale nude on a divan, leaves him wondering if she’s alive or dead. The second, a Picasso rendering of his young lover: “She was not perfect, like the other, not in a classical sense, her limbs were short, she was pudgy, she might even waddle a little as she walked. But. She was devastatingly sexy. That was it, maybe. The painting was so simple. Simple joy, simple sensual heat, simple love in her presence. I felt what Picasso must have felt.”
He concludes this riff with his own ethos, however tattered by events: “[T]his dark yearning is what happens when we idealize anything: the form of a woman, a landscape, a spiritual impulse. We move it closer to the realm of the dead, if not outright kill it. The living joyful exuberant woman becomes statue marble and dead, or pornographic and equally dead… That is when I decided that whatever I did as an artist, I would try to go toward the living and not away from it.” But does he?
