Discipline

Pham, author of the memoir Pop Song, turns to fiction with the dazzling story of an art critic who publishes a novel about the former professor who rejected her after their affair. On Christine’s book tour, she takes stock of her motivations for writing the novel, reexamines her connection to the work of the artists who shaped her, and reflects on how she floundered in art school until a popular professor began consistently praising her work and extending invitations to his home for social gatherings. After they had sex, he stopped contacting Christine, causing her to spiral and cease painting altogether (“It was too hard to decouple my work from my body, which felt like something I was carrying around, burdened with and stained by association”). Pham’s novel takes a dramatic turn when Christine begins receiving cryptic messages from the professor, who invites her to visit him in Maine. It’s a page-turner, but the main event is Christine’s meditations on art, ambition, and the relationship between art and life, as when she looks at the photorealistic paintings of Vija Celmins (“I had never truly tried to replicate life the way Celmins did, in its exactitude, down to the finest detail. But I did think there was something important, maybe even necessary, in trying to make something that depicted, even if not life as it was, then life as how it felt”). This is electrifying. Agent: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, Gernert & Co. (Jan.)