At long last - an intellectual page-turner

Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved is a ferociously clever book that, for the first third, I thought I disliked, writes Geraldine Bedell
What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt
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What I Loved

by Siri Hustvedt

Sceptre £14.99, pp352

Siri Hustvedt has written a novel of ideas, in which she tackles questions of how much of what we perceive is personal, how much shared, how much is fixed for all time and how much is liable to shift. What I Loved is a ferociously clever book that, for the first third, I thought I disliked.

Hustvedt writes like a critic, assessing, analysing, interpreting. (This is not unapt: her narrator, Leo Hertzberg, is a professor of art history who has written a book called A Brief History of Seeing in Western Painting.) Her characters inhabit a rarefied world of SoHo art galleries and universities and are so preoccupied with interpreting their lives that you wonder how they manage to live them.

Leo looks back on his life in old age, with failing eyesight. 'Every story we tell about ourselves can only be told in the past tense,' he notes in the closing pages. 'It winds backwards from where we now stand, no longer the actors in the story but its spectators who have chosen to speak.' His approach to this retelling is symbolised by the collection of objects culled from his past that he keeps in a drawer.

Depending on how he arranges them, they evoke different feelings, different interpretations, and it is these that interest him, more than the events themselves; when telling his story, he often glides over long periods in a single paragraph or selects one tiny incident, dispensed with in a sentence or two, as a jumping-off point for long passages of reflection. There are detailed descriptions of his friend Bill Weschler's art, sometimes as a prelude to more general art musings. But since the pieces cannot be seen in reality and didn't spring off the page, this all felt rather hard going.

For around the first 130 pages, prior to the death on which the action turns, the characters seem over-intellectualised and over-intellectualising. They are typified by Lazlo, the friend who always slips Leo an envelope before he leaves, usually containing an improving quotation. 'I had already been treated to Thomas Bernhard's spleen, "Velázquez, Rembrandt, Giorgione, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Goethe ... Pascal, Voltaire, all of them such inflated monstrosities" and to a quote from Philip Guston I particularly liked, "To know and yet how not to know is the greatest puzzle of all".'

Leo retraces his family's friendship with Bill and his family, which begins when he buys an early Weschler painting. The Weschlers move in upstairs in Leo's building and their wives have baby boys at the same time. For the first section of the book, the action seems to be like one of Bill's art works, which take the form of paintings or sculptures in boxes or behind doors - frustratingly distant, removed, peopled by characters who are primarily objects, to be observed.

This isn't helped by the sense of foreboding that haunts the early section. But then the anticipated death occurs and the novel takes off. There is a long description of grief, moving without being mawkish, which combines intellectual rigour with wild feeling; after this, the characters' need to make sense of the world is more than an academic challenge: it is psychologically overwhelming.

And then, in the final third, the book, surprisingly, becomes a page-turner. Bill's son, Mark, has another way of seeing altogether; he 'has become an interpretative conundrum'. Is he mad or does he simply inhabit a culture that is out of the reach of the middle aged? And, if in some sense mad, how should his illness be described? His stepmother is researching a book about nineteenth-century hysterics. Hysteria is an illness that no longer exists but has been transmuted into, among other things, antisocial personality. And reassuring as it might be to think that the actions of the sufferers of antisocial personality are monstrous and unnatural, peculiar to psychopaths, Leo is a German Jew and knows they are widely shared.

Any novel, as any piece of art, relies on expressing the particular perceptions of its author while being sufficiently recognisable to the audience to be meaningful. This paradox is what fascinates Siri Hustvedt. She is interested in the gap between the shared story and the individual reading. And in this very ambitious book the themes wind back and forth, criss-crossing, tangling the reader up in images and symbols, suggesting patterns and then shifting them. Hustvedt's intelligence is sharp and there are some wonderful observations.

'I've always thought that love thrives on a certain kind of distance,' Leo says at one point, 'that it requires an awed separateness to continue. Without that necessary remove, the physical minutiae of the other person grows ugly in its magnification.'

That seemed absolutely recognisable, a useful insight. And the book haunted me afterwards far more than I had expected. It was worth persisting beyond the opening, with its art-criticism-applied-to-life approach which, like Bill's work, appears to be 'an investigation of the inadequacy of symbolic surfaces - the formulas of explanation that fall short of reality'. The story gets beyond this post-modern preoccupation with storytelling itself, and takes on a dramatic and felt life of its own. In the end, it is not only clever, but engaging.