The Artist's Widow [Paperback]

In The Artist's Widow, images of Bereavement abound. After a long and devoted marriage, a painter's widow is attending a retrospective showing of her late husband's work. As she looks at his paintings, she can't help but reflect, as though her husband were also present in the room: "It was the sort of party John and Lyris Crane hated."

Later, amid the snobbery and insincerity of an inexpensive dinner give by the gallery owner, ostensibly in Lyris' honor, but filled with people she doesn't even know, she comes to have other, more intensely personal feelings for John: "Lyris felt a pang of envy for John, among the flowers and berries of the crematorium gardens. But the trees would be gathering darkness now, the reeds and bullrushes whispering, a chilly dew rising to meet the rain. Time to come indoors."

At home, Lyris takes off her tight blue dress shoes and dons a pair of John's worn slippers. "Kind boats," she thinks. These two words tell us more about the marriage of John and Lyris Crane and evoke an empathy that many writers cannot evoke with an entire book filled with words.

The Artist's Widow is a finely-drawn portrait of Lyris, herself a painter, and the emotions she faces as she rallies against sorrow, solitude, frailty, confusion and fear that surrounds an eighty-year-old woman and the seemingly uncaring, forbidding world of outsiders.

Shena MacKay, a Scottish novelist, is a wonderful writer, a true master of words, and, although the portrait of Lyris is a wonderfully-drawn one, the book, itself, is still fatally-flawed.

In her best books, primarily, The Orchard on Fire and An Advent Calendar, MacKay characterizes villains as Britains who are politically, economically or culturally privileged. They are atrocious characters and people we love to hate. Her heroes, on the other hand, tend to be misused, sparky, angelic; the downtrodden who manage, somehow, to take wing and fly. Although this may seem contrived in an author of lesser talent, MacKay gets away with it because she really knows how to be elusive, how to use sudden shifts and reversals in time and how to write magical passages filled with intensity, energy and sometimes, comedy.

In The Artist's Widow, MacKay misses the mark. Surprisingly so for someone so talented. Although Lyris is a wonderful character, her sadness is reduced to a mere grimace and the other characters are, sadly, no more than mere cliches. The "bad" ones are exaggerated out of proportion while the "good" ones are just too pat and pallid, as are the comeuppances for the former and the rewards for the latter.

One of the "bad" characters is Nathan, Lyris' great-nephew by marriage. Nathan is a young artist on the make; a man who sees that none of his friends gets ahead and whose friends see that he doesn't, either. Although his repulsiveness is patently obvious to us, Nathan, himself, feels it to be nothing less than cutting-edge.

MacKay, usually so very good, experiences a lapse with The Artist's Widow. In describing Nathan she says, "His eyelids, with a bristle of pale lashes, were tender and his eyes dull green and hard." Later, Nathan becomes "a pond with green scum on its surface."

Nathan, unfortunately, is not the only victim of language-overkill. One unfortunate woman is nicknamed "The Wounded Squid" because "she was so clinging and so easily hurt into squirting her purple sentimental ink over everything."

Even Lyris' dead husband is not spared. MacKay writes, "The last canvases burned with the brilliant chemical derangement of autumn when the slow fuses smoldering up the stalks of senescent leaves burst into mineral fire."

Despite his awfulness, and Nathan is awful, he really is no more than a cardboard cutout. And then there is Zoe, who seems to harbor some redemptive value. She however, is nothing more than a false start that soon peters out.

On the side of the "good" guys, there is Jackie, a victim of racism who is far too far-fetched to be believable, Candy and Clovis, the gentle but confused bookseller.

The dispensations of justice in this book come all too quickly and patently and the characters seem to be playing a role into which they are forced. Shena MacKay, to her credit, is not a tidy author, but in The Artist's Widow, she is downright confusing. Read Shena MacKay, by all means, but read An Advent Calendar or The Orchard on Fire rather than The Artist's Widow. The first two are really first-rate books, books that are worthy of this wonderfully-talented author.