In the new book, the contemporary story focuses on an enigmatic, brilliant painter, Robert Oliver, who has been hospitalized after attempting to attack Gilbert Thomas’s painting “Leda’’ in the National Gallery in Washington. His attending psychiatrist, Dr. Andrew Marlowe, is also an artist, and this connection prompts the doctor to learn all he can about his patient by interviewing those closest to him - and to make sense of Oliver’s most recent project, a series of paintings that all feature an intriguing dark-haired woman.
As part of his inquiry, Marlowe also studies some letters Oliver has been obsessively rereading, correspondence between two painters, a young woman and her husband’s uncle, from the 1870s. Their tragic, star-crossed story - involving both art and parenthood - may hold the key to mysteries past and present.
With the bulk of the narrative carried by the first-person monologues of Marlowe and the two main women in Oliver’s life, his ex-wife, Kate, and his discarded younger lover, Mary Bertison, voice is essential. Unfortunately, Kostova flubs two out of three.
Her Kate Oliver is a compelling narrator, believable as she relates her early courtship by the artist and her later disillusionment as she gives up her own painting to care for their children, losing his interest along the way. But Marlowe is wooden. An aging bachelor, he spends too much time dwelling on his waning attractiveness to younger women, which serves to set up the plot but feels inappropriately self-conscious. His sections provide necessary action, but without any real thrust. And when Mary makes her appearance, she has little to offer and is distinguished only by a series of quirks, such as calling her mother “Muzzy,’’ rather than character traits.
