Austin Fraser is an eighty three year old artist who is looking back on his life and the mistakes he has made. He is a man haunted by the memories of the people he never let into his life. One of them is George, a china painter he grew to know as a young man visiting the town of Davenport in the summer. Another is Sara, the model he painted in the grand landscapes of the Great Lakes on the shores of Silver Islet where his father once owned a silver mine. Austin grew up in a home where affection never paid a big role in his solitary life. He travelled to New York City as a young man bent on a career in painting. There, under the tutelage of the famed artist and teacher Robert Henri, his tendency to tread carefully through life was enforced by Henri’s philosophy of painting. Henri encouraged his art students to remain distant from the world and their own feelings. His philosophy was that for an artist, these things belonged only on paper or canvas. While in New York City, Fraser met another man who had once been a student of Henri’s but had broken away from his teaching. Rockwell Kent was a man who drank hungrily of life and immersed himself in pain and pleasure, a man who craved the catastrophe of every experience he encountered or created. Austin and Rockwell became friends although Austin remained a voyeur in the relationship, a traveler who accompanied Kent on his quest for experiences but who did not deeply involve himself in any of them. It was Robert Henri who had really won his soul.Austin learned to paint using a technique which masked the reality he painted. After rendering a realistic scene or figure on canvas, he overpainted it with layers of paint and glazes to hide his initial piece underneath. His greatest fear was that some of the underpainting would later be revealed on the canvas and he hung on to some of his paintings for years to ensure that if some of the original subject matter rose to the surface, that he could paint over it and “correct it”.Austin loved the hustle and bustle of Greenwich Village and New York City in the twenties and thirties. He had a studio there and painted during the winter months. Although mesmerized by all the activity around him, he remained an observer rather than entering the fray and experiencing it. During the summer Austin would travel from this hectic life to head to Davenport where his friend the sensitive and gentle George Kearns lived and painted china, an art Austin frowned on. This was also where the two as young men had met the heartless Vivian, a beautiful and vivacious singer with whom George became obsessed. Later, after his visits with George, Austin would head to Silver Islet where for years he painted and made love to Sara, his longtime model and mistress. Sara opened her heart and home to Austin and gave him everything he wanted or needed, but Austin always remained distant from her, remembering the words of Henri his teacher. He did not find this difficult and actually it was what he preferred. He did not like forming close or lasting attachments as he believed distance and a certain coldness were essential to his art.Austin recounts the events leading up to the war when George as a Canadian left to fight for the British Empire. When George was injured overseas and in hospital recovering, he met Augusta Moffat, a Canadian nurse who he met up with later when they both returned to Canada. Both were broken by the trauma of war and Augusta spent several months in hospital suffering from shell shock. Over time, the two developed a caring relationship and during one of his visits, Austin was struck by the tenderness with which they treated one another.When Austin meets Vivian many years later, they spend the night together. The next morning she asks Austin to take her back to Davenport to see George. He quickly agrees to her request without thinking of its implications, a mistake which proves fatal. Following the events in Davenport, Austin messages Sara asking her to meet him. Even though he has not spoken to her for several years, he knows she will come. Sara heads out on a difficult and dangerous journey miles across a snowy landscape to meet him, while he waits for her in Port Arthur. He is determined he will try to love her when they meet up again. He watches for her from the window, relentlessly checking every few hours to see a glimpse of her coming across the lake. But as her approach slowly reduces the miles that separate them, Austin becomes fearful, changes his mind and leaves, abandoning the woman who truly loved him. He had spent fifteen years of his life with her, but his fears of intimacy prevented him from ever loving her.This is a rather sad story of a man who could not learn to engage in life and who now wanders around an isolated, cold and minimally furnished house, nattering with a housekeeper and beginning his final painting. It is of himself, a man who could never accept the love that came to him. He is now left empty and alone, with the memories of his mistakes and the ghosts of his past who insist on accompanying him through his final days. Urquhart’s writing is beautiful. She has a way of rendering the Canadian landscape in broad sweeps of texture and color. And I applaud the originality of her story, using the underpainting technique as a metaphor for Austin Fraser’s life. Her account of Augusta’s war time experiences and those of her friend Maggie are also heart rendering. But I could not connect with the lead character. I could not even empathize with him. I grew to almost hate him and I did not want to read any more about him, which is the reason I awarded this Governor General Award winner the score I did. It should have been higher, but emotionally I never felt I could be enveloped in Austin Fraser’s story, the story of a self-centered man who disliked human contact and walked carefully through a life he never really lived. He was a man so blind to life’s subtleties that he did great harm to those who cared for him.
It is difficult to pinpoint precisely why this quite well-written, well-crafted, well-plotted book is in the end unsatisfying. This is the story of a fictional painter in an all-too-real world of art, love, war, privation, and plenty who keeps himself aloof from it all in order to be the more objective artist. He is a great success in his chosen field, but ends up with little but grief, regret, and pain.I suspect that part of my uneasiness comes from the fact that a man this disconnected from feeling falls more into the category of psychopath than merely emotionally unavailable. As the consequences of his distance make clear, though he does not physically harm anyone, he nonetheless cuts a swath through the humanity around him. Though he feels regret at this, we never really get the sense that he has grown at all toward an emotional maturity, even in the reflection of his old age, the perspective from which he writes this tale.One option available to the author might have been to examine the very nature of his pathology, to at least make him introspective about it. After all, everything and everyone in his life is telling him what he is missing, where he is off the rails, but he cannot listen and doesn't even seem particularly curious about what they mean. Though one of his parents was dead and the other quite distant, we never see that any particular trauma should have made him into such an emotional cripple.Which is not to say that this is not a masterful work of fiction, with landscapes and characters evoked with skill and generous feeling. I was reminded most of all of Wallace Stegner and his ability to depict the everyday human as a real, pulsating, fragile, resilient presence we feel we can reach out to touch. Also like Stegner, she is able to draw us into landscapes, to paint a picture that is evocative and moving. Each of these landscapes depicts what the protagonist ought to be feeling but isn't, and their use is that much more skillful and astute.Thus, as a portrait of a man incapable of deep emotion this book succeeds quite well. Unlike, say, the spooky Ripley books of Patricia Highsmith, this one does not give us any idea of what it must be like to live inside the skin of such a man and so, though brilliantly executed, falls short of being a truly great book.
Do You like book The Underpainter (1998)?
This 1997 winner of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award is the third novel I’ve read by this talented writer.It’s told from the point of view of painter Austin Fraser, living in his old age in his childhood hometown of Rochester NY. The setting moves from upstate New York to the northern shores of Lake Ontario and Lake Superior – both Canadian locations. It’s told in flashbacks from Austin’s present (1970s) to 1914 and the ensuing years. I was struck by the different affects that the declaration of war in 1914 had on Canada, and on the United States.The title refers to the method which Austin now uses for all his paintings: blank white over an “underpainting”. Why he paints like this is revealed as the story is.Urquhart weaves her story skillfully, building to a heart-rending climax.Read this if: you appreciate beautiful prose and understated stories; or you’re interested in the contrast between the effects of WWI on Canada and its closest neighbour the United States.4 stars
—Debbie
A difficult book to rate (as if any of them are easy) The Underpainter begins so slowly, so carefully that all I really could see was gesso being spread on canvas. My eyes would grow heavy and I'd wonder if painting something myself wouldn't be a better use of my time. I'm glad I didn't. The elements of the picture came together in the last third of the book, and the result was truly "amazing"—amazing as in powerfully crisp, searlingly painful, and painfully honest. The protagonist, an American painter Austin Fraser, is one those very unlikable yet in the end somehow lovable characters that can only be drawn by a real artist. The story that didn't seem to exist for the first two-thirds of the novel turned out be both engaging and complete—its power contained less in action than in the overlapping lives of the models used by the protaganist. This is Urquhart at her best.
—Brian
Smooth like honey and tastes so sweet, Urquhart's writing fills me, keeps me full. It's an indulgence. As beautifully delivered it is as meaningful, The Underpainter was a privilege to read. I cannot fathom the words to describe the dream-like quality of her work but I can say I am forever touched by this book. I'll leave this review with a passage, that in this moment, hits close to my heart.(view spoiler)[ Because, you understand, Sara had told me about winter-stricken deer, had described the delicate balance that keeps them alive when the season is unusually harsh. They have endured so much already, she had told me, so much scarcity and hardship, that their metabolism slows down to allow for survival. Any interruption of this, any sudden spurt of energy, causes damage."Don't run," I had shouted at the fleeting deer. "Please, please don't run." I stood yelling in the forest, causing the animal's flight to intensify. Faster, further, causing more harm."Often it is their last run," Sara had told me. "This one final rush of adrenaline--no matter how minor--is just too much for them; the system can't cope. You can see a serious amount of deterioration in a week. More often than not, after two weeks, they are dead."She had added that sometimes, walking in the woods in the springtime, she had found carcasses.I put my head on the steering wheel. I wept. (hide spoiler)]
—Lesley
