In The Young Painters, a piece of fiction appearing in The New Yorker, Ms. Krauss delivers a powerful story about he provenance of a painting. This work of art hangs in an apartment of a friend of the narrators who happens to be a renowned dancer. The story comes across as a confession, of sorts, like a person might tell a judge after harboring the awful truth for years, and when it all comes out, it does so with great force. The story turns to the severely morbid almost immediately when we learn that the people who created the painting were children, and they met with a gruesome end at the hands of their deranged mother, but I’ll let you sniff that part of the story out yourself.
I’m not sure if story is a part of Great House, her third novel which will be published this fall, or it’s a stand alone story. If we take the Franzen school of thought, at least from The New Yorker’s point of view, then this work of fiction from Ms. Krauss is a slice of her new novel. After reading this story, I’d like to read the novel, if the two are connected, in some way, and I’d like to read it right now. There is a smoky quality to the language here, it reminds me of stories that I once heard at a dinner part on New Years Eve in Rome, shared with a small group, revealed to everyone like lost treasure and hard to forget. At the same time, there is a modern feel (I don’t mean “modern” in the Frank Llyod Wright sense of the word, more “contemporary”) to our narrator, like she’s going through some form of crisis, a kind of awakening, or perhaps a realization that as a writer, there are at least three sides to each story. At the same time this woman is miserable at having to deal with realities which come with writing a novel about her own father, and how she doesn’t know the difference between being a storyteller, and a person in her own stories, or life.
The story our narrator hears is told to her while she’s at the home of the dancer, and later on we find out that the story in question is reworked by our narrator and published in a “prominent” magazine. It’s no accident that The Young Painters has been published, and I can almost see around the next corner, where this story might be going, or where Ms. Krauss wants me to think its going. Either way, our narrator and Ms. Krauss are in on the trick, or somehow I was fooled, which happens to me quite often. I’ll admit it, Ms. Krauss, you got me.
-JR
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