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From Library Journal
From the perspective of advanced age, Austin Fraser looks back over his life as an artist and his summers spent in the lakeside town of Davenport, Ontario, and in the abandoned mining town of Silver Islet on the north shore of Lake Superior. Fraser's artistic method consists of underpainting a realistic depiction of a scene to which he then applies layer upon layer of obscuring detail. Urquhart (Away, LJ 6/1/94) uses this technique in reverse to tell her protagonist's story by gradually peeling back layers to reveal truths that lie hidden beneath. An emotionally hollow man, Austin experiences life vicariously through others. When World War I breaks out, he watches from the sidelines as his friend George joins up to fight in Europe. George returns haunted by his experiences and by his attachment to a young nurse shattered by her own wartime losses. Although Fraser never comes fully alive, the stories of his friends are compelling enough to give this quietly affecting novel its forward momentum. An elegantly written addition to collections of literary fiction.?Barbara Love, Kingston P.L., Ontario
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Kirkus Reviews
A finely nuanced, lyrical fourth novel from the award-winning Urquhart (Away, 1994, etc.), featuring a successful painter who, in the entrenched isolation of his old age, recalls the chain of events that cost him his best friend and the one woman who loved him. Taken one summer during WW I by his mine-speculating father to the northern shore of Lake Superior, teenager Austin Fraser, already a promising art student in Manhattan, meets Sara, the miner's daughter who will be his lover, model, and inspiration for more than 15 years. Each June, he packs up paints and supplies to go to her, but at summer's end he returns to the city and forgets she exists, focusing instead on the images he's made of her. In a similar way he compartmentalizes his other summer friend, George, a shopkeeper on the Canadian side of Lake Ontario who paints porcelain and is much altered as a result of unimaginable suffering in the war. With annual visits, Austin keeps these northern contacts alive, renewing himself in the process, but in his rigorously defended self-absorption refusing to make further commitments, especially to Sara: When his closest city friend, the exuberant artist Rockwell Kent, points out in drunken bluntness both Austin's obsession with her and the degree to which he's using her, Austin ends his friendship with Kent immediately. The next summer he calls it quits with Sara as well, just like that, and soon thereafter, utterly blind or callously indifferent to what he's doing, he brings together the lethal elements that plunge George back into his wartime hell. Few stories have brought artistic narcissism to light so powerfully or thoroughly, but this is a painterly masterwork also in its own right, poignant in each of its several landscapes and subtle in tracing the mingled nuances of love and pain. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
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Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Jane Urquhart's The Underpainter, a gem of a novel,
By "zeke8" (Kansas City, Mo. USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Underpainter (Paperback)
I found Jane Urquhart's novel to be quite compelling and well-written. Being an artist myself, I was eager to read a novel whose main character was an artist. The author captured the way in which art (any art) training is abjectly consuming at the expense of individual development. Artists and musicians tend toward the egocentric . . . partly because of the intensity of their training. Austin certainly fell into that category. I was also pleased that Ms. Urquhart was able to depict with sensitivity the effects of trauma on the human psyche. She was not only sensitive but very graphic if one was able to travel with her during the story's telling. It is rare to find such idiosycratic topics dealt with in the context of a novel much less to find them dealt with really well. The most compelling thing about the novel, however, is the warmth and compassion that she develops and portrays in her characters. In spite of their very human frailties, they are lovable if not always likeable. I look forward to reading other Jane Urquhart works! An artist/musician/reader
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
haunting,
By EJW (Mill Valley, California USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Underpainter (Paperback)
One way I measure a book is by how much it makes me think - and for how long after I've finished it. I first read this book two years ago, and still it haunts me. The characters are not especially sympathetic - least of all the artist - but what is disturbing is how well they are drawn from real life. The author has as remarkable an eye for character and human nature as a fine painter for his or her subject. I've recommended this book to many, but only to those who can appreciate a story of quiet depth. It's also a story that demands rereading.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sensual,
By
This review is from: The Underpainter (Paperback)
"The Underpainter", is a magnificent work of art.Luminous landscapes inhabit the psyche of the artist, Austin Fraser, like pulsing echoes which haunt the desolate, frozen compartments of his heart. I am mesmerized by the gripping power of this tale about a man unwilling and therefore unable to commit - neither to friends, nor love, nor landscape - nor even (and especially), to his own art. His life - the love of a woman, the paintings, the landscape he inhabits - all of this detail and feeling - he obscures and obliterates with surgical acts of "Erasure". I highly recommend reading this powerful and moving story by Jane Urquhart.
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