Catherine Lescault

Idlewild’s novel is a fantastic exploration of the creative process and the horror of creation, heavily rooted in Honoré de Balzac’s “The Unknown Masterpiece.” Balzac’s characters move through the novel as spirits and paintings, each a different incarnation in a mirrored world. In the opening epistolaries, Mary Frenhofer hopes that the “rarified air” of an inherited country home will help her husband recover from depression and finish his masterpiece, a book years in the making; she doesn’t know that the house is marred by a torturous history of artists going mad and muses dying within. “The house of fiction has many rooms,” Dr. Frenhofer observes. “But in this house a room is missing.” The novel takes a sharp turn into the unreal when Dr. Frenhofer is proven to be right; a portrait of the dead artist Porbus is found in a hidden room, and from it he walks like a specter. In a mirror universe, Porbus’s muse Gillette is the ingénue painter seeking to perfect her masterpiece, and Mary’s letters are found documents. Gillette is Pygmalion, and Porbus is entirely her creation. Idlewild’s novel becomes a palimpsest in itself; pieces of Balzac’s original narrative are obscured and repurposed, until the novel itself imitates Balzac’s fictional painting of Catherine Lescault. Idlewild’s exploration of the nature of art is a bewildering, beautiful novel full of intriguing characters. [em](BookLife) [/em]