THE PAINTED KISS

Hickey imagines the bonds between Gustav Klimt and his younger lover—whose name he pronounced with his dying breath—in her expressively written debut. Before Emilie Flöge became the owner of a successful Viennese fashion house and Klimt became a famed, controversial painter, she was a privileged 12-year-old reluctantly taking drawing lessons and he was her starving artist teacher. From her WWII hideaway in the Austrian countryside in 1944, where she has transported Gustav's drawings ("all I could bring from Vienna... [perhaps] the only things of his to survive"), the aged Emilie flashes back to her fin-de-siècle hometown. Hickey traces the changing relationship between Klimt and his protégé from when she first became his art student as an adolescent through their on-again, off-again romance as she matures to their complicated relationship that culminates in the famed painting The Kiss . While the novel bears some obvious similarities to Girl with a Pearl Earring , it doesn't quite have that novel's power. But Hickey's language is sensual, lush and unhurried, and the prose wears its author's research gracefully. (Apr.)