Monday's Reviews Today: Salem Witches & 18th Century Painting

-- Publishers Weekly, 6/27/2008 7:50:00 AM

In Kathleen Kent's "gripping and original first novel," The Heretic’s Daughter, an actual family history is the basis for an engrossing yarn set during the Salem witch hunt. And art critic Jed Perl, in his take on the 18th-century painter, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Antoine’s Alphabet: Watteau and His World, offers an "exquisitely composed study" that ultimately proves "book of rare beauty and provocation."

The Heretic’s Daughter
Kathleen Kent. Little, Brown, $24.99 (352p) ISBN 978-0-316-02448-8
A family’s conflict becomes a battle for life and death in this gripping and original first novel based on family history from a descendant of a condemned Salem witch. After a bout of smallpox, 10-year-old Sarah Carrier resumes life with her mother on their family farm in Andover, Mass., dimly aware of a festering dispute between her mother, Martha, and her uncle about the plot of land where they live. The fight takes on a terrifying dimension when reports of supernatural activity in nearby Salem give way to mass hysteria, and Sarah’s uncle is the first person to point the finger at Martha. Soon, neighbors struggling to eke out a living and a former indentured servant step forward to name Martha as the source of their woes. Sarah is forced to shoulder an even heavier burden as her mother and brothers are taken to prison to face a jury of young women who claim to have felt their bewitching presence. Sarah’s front-row view of the trials and the mayhem that sweeps the close-knit community provides a fresh, bracing and unconventional take on a much-covered episode. (Sept.)

Antoine’s Alphabet: Watteau and His World
Jed Perl. Knopf, $25 (224p) ISBN 978-0-307-26662-0
The 18th-century rococo artist Jean-Antoine Watteau is art critic Perl’s favorite painter, one who transforms “powerful feelings—of love, friendship, lust, avidity, curiosity—into delectable artistic play” and “poetic pattern.” Perl’s exquisitely composed study is organized alphabetically; from “Actors” and “Art-for-Art’s Sake” to “Zeuxis,” each chapter also involves a theme, individual or movement related to Watteau. There are many delightful surprises, even to the reader familiar with the artist’s oeuvre; Perl illuminates the links between Watteau’s Harlequins and Pierrots and Beckett’s characters, “so clownish and so heartrending.” His entry on “Flirtation” expands this theme, ubiquitous in Watteau’s paintings, into a profound commentary on love and metamorphosis. Perl’s essays on Watteau’s most famous works, The Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera and Gersaint’s Shopsign, are equally inspired; Cythera displays what for Perl are Watteau’s most poignant themes: the confounding of one’s own emotions and the “elegant chaos” of the mind’s consistently contradictory nature. Perl, art critic for the New Republic, has written a carefully researched, book of rare beauty and provocation. 44 illus. (Sept.)