What I Loved - ISBNLookup.com

From the Publisher

"Superb. . .What I Loved is a rare thing, a page turner written at full intellectual stretch, serious but witty, large-minded and morally engaged." —The New York Times Book Review

"So richly imagined is the art in her book that it serves not just to illuminate hidden emotions but also as a subject in itself. . .A wrenching portrait of parental grief, then a psychological thriller, and finally a meditation on the perspective of memory."—Vogue

"A great book. The twinning of narrative pleasure with intellectual rigor isn't rare. In fact, it's easy to find if you're plowing through, say, the Modern Library, engaging with classics that come to you already canonized and annointed. But to stumble into such a relationship with a contemporary. . .writer is a heady feeling. Those of us who read new fiction dream of finding such a book." —Newsday

"No image is wasted, no sentence superfluous in creating a novel that teems with ideas, emotions.... Hustvedt's novel is a quietly astounding work of fiction that defies categorization."—Los Angeles Times

"A remarkable achievement of Siri Hustvedt's prose, with its attention to nuance and intricacy is its demonstration that friendship is a powerful form of intelligence. The book's final pages acknowledge nearly overwhelming loss, but because the reader understands so much, their sadness feels almost like joy."—The Washington Post

The Los Angeles Times

Twenty-five years of the New York art world, with all of its hyperkinetic creativity, petty jealousies and dazzling degeneracy, is brought to life by Siri Hustvedt in her third novel, What I Loved, Narrated by Leo Hertzberg, 72, who begins his account as a 45-year-old art historian living in SoHo, the novel pulses with an electric current of ideas and people whom Leo remembers with a fierceness and particularity that bely his advancing age and physical infirmities. — Paula Woods

The New Yorker

When the narrator of Hustvedt's third novel, an affable art-history professor at Columbia called Leo Hertzberg, buys a picture by Bill Wechsler, a lugubrious, handsome painter, a friendship ensues. It's 1975, admiration leads to intimacy, and the two men and their wives end up living in the same building on Greene Street. The revolver on the wall is a Swiss Army knife that Leo gives his son for his eleventh birthday: when it goes missing, the book turns from novel of art-world manners to psychological thriller. Hustvedt is terrific at evoking the milieu of the haute bourgeoisie -- the house in Vermont, the wine-drenched meals, the migraines. But, as a narrator, Leo, now a reminiscent seventy, is full of orotund declarations about life and love that muffle the well-constructed plot.

The New York Times

Many authors might try to send up these people and their world, but Ms. Hustvedt — the author of two earlier novels, The Blindfold and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl — doesn't go for the satire. And in the first half of What I Loved, she succeeds in evoking her self-absorbed characters' lives with startling sympathy and nuance, tracing the 25-year friendship between an artist and an art historian with enormous psychological precision, while demonstrating a depth of emotion not evinced by her earlier fiction. — Michiku Kakutani

The Washington Post

A remarkable achievement of Siri Hustvedt's prose, with its attention to nuance and intricacy, is its demonstration that friendship is a powerful form of intelligence. The book's final pages acknowledge nearly overwhelming loss, but because a reader understands so much, their sadness feels almost like joy. Both lives have been rich and meaningful — and the same must be said of this very fine novel. — David Huddle

Don McLeese

Profound friendship and devastating loss provide the emotional linchpins for Siri Hustvedt's third and most compelling novel. The author's previous fiction, 1992's The Blindfold and 1996's The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, was suggestively elliptical—a pair of postmodern parables that explored issues of art and identity and attracted a cult following. What I Loved, like its predecessors, is overflowing with ideas, yet it has such an engrossing pull that the reader feels immersed in nothing less than the richness of life itself.

The novel begins as the story of a painting, one bought by art historian Leo Hertzberg from an unknown artist named William Wechsler. After purchasing the picture, which shows a woman reclining in what initially appears to be an empty room, Hertzberg meets the artist, who explains that his works are all self-portraits. The art establishes a common denominator for the two men, and a friendship forms between them that will evolve over decades, enveloping the families of both.

What I Loved takes the form of Hertzberg's memoir, written a quarter-century after his first encounter with Wechsler. By his early seventies, Hertzberg suffers a cloudiness of vision that makes what he sees in his memory all the more crucial to him. Even so, he recognizes from the outset that what he has had the most trouble seeing clearly is himself.

But the lives of Hertzberg and Wechsler are so intertwined that it's hard for Hertzberg to see himself independent of his friend. Wechsler moves into the same building as Hertzberg, the two become fathers of sons (Matthew and Mark, although Hustvedt doesn't belabor the biblical implications),their families take vacations together. Hertzberg's relationships with Wechsler's wife and mistress, his own marital troubles, the complications of his dealings with Wechsler's increasingly distrustful son all evolve against the backdrop of their bond.

As the careers of Hertzberg and Wechsler progress, Hustvedt offers provocative insight into the commodification of art. Though the author has some interesting insights into the manner in which reputations are made and price tags escalate, her peripheral characters from the gallery circuit seem like caricatures. Among them are a critic who disdains Wechsler and a pop/performance artist of monstrous transgressions who attempts to create "the ultimate work of art." Where the novel's central figures are animated and full of ideas, lesser characters seem more like the embodiment of ideas themselves.

But What I Loved is so much more than the sum of its ideas. Well-rounded and multilayered, the book is less about the art world than about the world at large, one where the interpretive consciousness is always reshaping, reordering and renewing the narrative through which it attempts to make some sense of life's contradictions and chaos. Through the selective vision of memory, the past pervades the present; the present informs the past.

"The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man," writes Hertzberg. "What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant.... We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die."

Over the course of years, the professor discovers who he is by doing his best to remember what he was. Only on the verge of blindness does he come to see himself more clearly than ever.

Publishers Weekly

The ardent exchange of ideas underlies all manner of passionate action in Hustvedt's third novel (after The Enchantment of Lily Dahl), a dark tale of two intertwined New York families. "What is memory's perspective? Does the man revise the boy's view or is the imprint relatively static, a vestige of what was once intimately known?" So muses Columbia University art historian Leo Hertzberg as he recalls the love affair between artist Bill ("Seeing is flux") Wechsler and his model/second wife, Violet, whom Leo secretly loves almost as much as his own wife, Erica. Leo and Bill become friends when Leo buys a huge portrait of Violet, the first painting Bill has ever sold, and the two are inseparable ever after. Erica and Bill's first wife, Lucille, give birth to sons in the same year and, soon afterward, the Wechslers buy a loft in the same SoHo building. When the boys are four, Bill and Lucille are divorced, and Bill marries Violet. Linked by their love of art and language (Erica is an English professor and Violet a Ph.D. student with a specialty in 19th-century forms of madness), the two couples talk insatiably about art and life, celebrating triumphs and weathering tragedy together. In its second half, the novel shifts into the terrain of the psychological thriller, as Bill and Lucille's son, Mark, a dangerously charming boy, grows up and slips into a sinister New York club scene. So solid and complex are Hustvedt's characters that the change in pace is effortlessly effected-the plot developments are the natural extension of the author's meticulous examination of relationships and motives. In considering Violet, Leo observes, "Unlike most intellectuals, [she] didn't distinguish between the cerebral and the physical." The same distinctions are blurred in this gripping, seductive novel, a breakout work for Hustvedt. Author tour. (Mar. 6) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Art historian Leo Hertzberg happens upon an extraordinary painting in New York City in 1975. When he tracks down the artist, Bill Weschler, the two become such dear friends that they end up blending their small families into one tight unit of shared milestones and close living quarters. For years, the men and their accomplished wives and bright young sons flow in and out of each other's lives until a numbing tragedy destroys the infrastructure. As they struggle to regain some sort of professional and personal equilibrium, the adults are faced with another impossible blow when the surviving child, dangerously and bafflingly defiant, engages in ever more frightening behavior. Parents can lose their children in all sorts of ways, and when they do, their lives forever revolve around that fatality. Hustvedt (The Enchantment of Lily Dahl) beautifully captures the devastation of such loss as she immerses the reader in the lives of two families who, hobbled by their shared wounds, desperately search for salvation in the accomplished world of art and intellectual brilliance in New York City. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/02; Hustvedt is novelist Paul Auster's wife.-Ed.]-Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.