Over the course of three productive decades, Brad Leithauser has published six novels and about a half-dozen collections of poetry. As a poet, he is often drawn to telling stories and exploring characters, his verse borne along a current of narrative. As a novelist, his characters and plots add emotional power through the massing of imagery and precision of language. It makes sense that one of his books, “Darlington’s Fall’’ was a novel-in-verse. A risk for a poet-novelist is imbalance: The poems can flatten into prose or lose their intensity of focus; the novels can stall amid lofty writing or literary preciousness, and ignore the engine of plot and character.
Home-front casualties
In World War II era, a family torn apart finds healing
In his new novel, “The Art Student’s War,’’ Leithauser does not ignore plot and character. Though set in the 10 years between 1943 and 1953, the novel feels packed with wartime stress, economic struggle, an influenza epidemic, racial tension, the effects of mental illness on family dynamics, the problem of art’s place in a time of national emergency. There are entwined romances, life-altering illnesses and losses, and personal transformation. The book creates a vividly constructed world in which “everything was always dissolving to reveal a deeper, anterior reality.’’
But the writing can be overdone, sluggish with adverbs and adjectives, as in this typical sentence: “Yet the nonjudgmental way Ronny spoke the term - as if it were a purely scientific designation - abruptly rendered the idea hideously plausible.’’ It is as though Leithauser feels compelled to intensify each noun or verb to heighten the moment rather than trusting the action to carry emotion. Sometimes the rhetoric is too high and melodramatic for the situation: “hers was the cry of a soul riven by that mortal recognition from which, henceforward, life must be refigured: the bare, astounding notion that Eternity itself isn’t large enough to make good the loss you’ve suffered.’’
The story deals in part with the impact of World War II on Detroit, “democracy’s true arsenal’’ in whose “beautiful factories, infernally aglow . . . the War would be won.’’ Factories that had produced automobiles are transformed to produce tanks and bombers; workers arrive to trigger a boom in such fields as home building, where Vico Paradiso is employed. His daughter, the art student Bianca, also known as Bea and Bia, begins visiting wounded soldiers in the city’s Ferry Hospital, where she herself had been born 18 years earlier, to sketch their bedside portraits. Intense relationships ensue with Bianca’s fellow art students and the soldiers she draws.
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