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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780140269734
ISBN: 0140269738
Label: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 368
Publication Date: 1998-10-01
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics)

Jane Urquhart's The Underpainter is a very modern novel preoccupied with the power of the past. Austin Fraser, born in 1894, is a modernist who relentlessly paints over his canvases, much as he tries to eradicate people from his life. Though he insists that he has forgone emotion and love, when he receives news of a women he once knew, he can no longer stop memories from encroaching.

Urquhart's novel ranges from late-century Rochester, New York, to Ontario to Paris to New York City. And not since Patrick White's The Vivisector have there been such disturbing scenes of the painter in action: "I believed that I was drawing--literally drawing--everything out of her, that his act of making art filled the space around me so completely there would be no other impressions possible beyond the ones I controlled." Amazingly, by exposing Fraser's emptiness, Urquhart makes us pity him. Though she has said that she was "quite angry with Austin" while writing The Underpainter, the author's language incises his reluctant humanity and turns his life into a work of art.

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Different
Review: A difficult novel to summarize based on its plot (which spans decades), its characters (which seem to foil off each other from the extremes of humanity), or its theme of art and the relationship between an artist and his subject. The central character is a fairly successful painter living in New York creating paintings begun up north during his fifteen years of summer trips to Ontario where he would live with his model, Sara. "Sara always attempted to give me her autobiography -- whole. But I tore it apart, silenced her, tossed the parts of her narrative I felt I couldn't use, like shredded paper, into the wind. I was constructing her, after all, in my paintings. I wanted no interference with the project." Yup, he's one charming guy. If that weren't enough, at the end of each summer, he'd cart all his paintings back to his New York studio eliminating his model from his life for another year and then literally obscure the images for the final product with layers and layers of more paint. This is a fairly engaging piece with enough other characters to foil this cruelty, selfishness, or whatever else you want to call it. An interesting read even if somewhat contrived.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: beautiful prose, but story falls flat
Review: Austin, an American painter, looks back at his life, and the people whose lives are intertwined with his memories. George, the serious and thoughtful china-painter, Sara, his quiet summertime model and lover, Augusta, who was a nurse during the war, who tells him her life story in one night while sitting in a china hall.

This contained some of the most beautiful writing I've ever read, and I've taken note of a dozen of the loveliest passages from the book. But as a whole, as a novel, I could barely finish. I had absolutely no sympathy for the protagonist, and the plot was unapparent to me until the last fraction of the book. As beautiful as those passages were, they weren't enough to keep me entertained through the rest of this novel. Writing style deserves 5 stars, characterization 3 stars, and plot and storyline 0.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Suitable for those who don't know anything about art
Review: Austin Fraser is a minimalist painter and a most unlikely hero. Urquart writes this book as his autobiography towards the end of his life. He has betrayed some very loyal friends during his lifetime. He appears to have no emotions, an unfeeling man surrounded by people, places and events that evoke passion. He drains his friends in the furtherance of his art giving nothing of himself in return.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: The Underwhelmer
Review: As a painter, books about artists naturally appeal to me. But even with such a head start, "The Underpainter" became one of those novels I only finish reading by skipping from section to section, trying to catch sight of those threads of the story which still held my interest. "The Underpainter" is a fictional first-person memoir told in the voice of Austin Fraser, an elderly abstract artist looking back on his life as the 1970s draw to a close. With unusual locales such as Rochester, New York, and a Canadian mining town; with the requisite celebrity cameos, in the form of Robert Henri and Rockwell Kent; and with the potential for romantic conflict, when the same girl catches the eye of both Austin and his summertime friend George, the ingredients for a good story were probably there.

In trying to figure out what went wrong, I'm inclined to cast the blame on the supporting characters. Austin in a different setting might still have come across as cold and uncaring, but his performance might have been more interesting on a different stage. His artistic education was credibly described, and his peculiar relationships with both his mother and his father were well explored. But George Kearns comes across as such an unambitious loser that he becomes unsympathetic, a trend that accentuates steadily right up to the book's conclusion. And we learn far, far more about George's lover Augusta Moffat than we really need to know - page after page describes her childhood before she ever crossed George and Austin's path, yet while her importance to the storyline is high, her actual protagonism is quite brief. On the other hand Sara, Austin's lover of fifteen years - fifteen summers, Austin would hasten to interject - never really comes alive. We never get even the slightest hint of why their relationship lasted so long. Was he just that good looking? Was she so plain no one else was interested in her?

Jane Urquhart writes well, and in her hands Austin sometimes speaks with resonance. Ultimately, though, in my opinion this book was let down by the direction its plot took, spending far too much time on a mediocre parochial supporting cast and not enough showing us Austin's performance in the art world he is supposed to have succeeded in.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Brilliantly exposes the selfishness of the artist's world
Review: Don't mistake "The Underpainter" for an airy fairy novel with a soft underbelly for its languid pastel coloured prose belies a diamond hard centre. In this beautifully evocative 1997 winner of the Governor General Book Award, Jane Urquhart pierces the cerebral exterior of successful modernist artist Austin Fraser to reveal a cold callous soul, whose inability to give or receive love leads to unconscious acts of cruelty to those closest to him. Only upon reflection as an old man does he acknowledge his part in their fate but he has only memories to taunt not console him. Sara, his model and lover of many years, proves to be nothing more than a handy object holding a mirror to his own soul. She doesn't really exist for him, hence when they break up, he looks back upon a relationship spanning fifteen summers, not fifteen years. Not surprisingly, the fox in Sara's garden - a metaphor for Sara's inner self - doesn't exist in his mind simply because he has never seen it. When his mentor Rockwell critiques his paintings, it turns out to be an indictment of the painter himself. Austin is furious but finally unable to deny Rockwell's judgement. Vivian, heartless and vain, is Austin's spiritual twin in the novel. They are an anathema to George and Augusta, whose lives are deeply rooted in reality. George is also an artist, but unlike Austin, doesn't despise industry but works in his father's china shop and has survived the war. Augusta is a farm girl, warm, practical and disciplined, and the perfect partner for George until Vivian, with Austin's help, re-enters their lives one evening with devastating result. "The Underpainter" brilliantly exposes the selfishness of art for art's sake. It is a chilling reminder that art unless tempered by humanity ultimately conceals more than it reveals. Jane Urquhart is a tremendous novelist. "The Underpainter" is a gorgeously written and incandescent piece of work that leaves an indelible impression long after it's read.

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