What Book to Read?

The Brutal Art (2008) – The Genius in the US – is the third of Kellerman’s five books. Ethan Muller, who narrates quite a lot of the novel, initially says it’s a detective story. But, as he later acknowledges, it isn’t really. ‘If I’m still writing a detective story – and I’m not so sure that I am …’ he says. I’m not so sure either. If it fits any kind of genre, it is the mystery story where the ordinary person hero sets out to solve some puzzle in which they inadvertently find themselves. But I don’t think it’s really a genre novel at all.

Ethan Muller looks back over his recent past to tell his story. At the time it begins, he is an art dealer, the maverick son of a rich New York family, almost totally estranged from his father. One day he is shown some drawings that have been found in a vacant apartment in a building owned by his family. He immediately sees that they are brilliant – the work, perhaps, of a genius. But where is the man who drew them? Ethan meets a retired policeman who tells him some of the faces in the drawings are those of young boys murdered years before. Could the unknown artist have killed them? Ethan feels driven to find out. Alongside this story we learn how the poor Jewish immigrant Solomon Mueller started out in America, and how succeeding generations of the family, now Mullers, prospered in material terms, but dealt badly with other aspects of their lives. What has this to do with Ethan and his missing artist? And how does his search change his life?

The novel thus operates on three levels. One is Ethan’s search for the artist, a well-constructed story with what turn out to be red herrings and dead ends, and some material that seems irrelevant but ends up being part of the resolution of the mystery. The second is the story of the family over time, presented as a series of interludes in the main story, much of it given immediacy by being in the present tense. This story must be seen as existing in its own right, being too detailed to be simply background for Ethan’s search. I find this narrative adequate, but no more than that; there is too much telling and not enough showing. Kellerman does nevertheless achieve a good sense of the inevitable convergence of the two stories, and there are enjoyable twists, including the one at the end – that I didn’t see coming – that finally ties the two stories together in quite a clever way.

The third level is what happens to Ethan’s own view of himself. He is an engaging character, particularly if you can forget that he is an over-privileged and rather selfish young man. The use of the first person helps the reader to take a sympathetic view of him, particularly as he has some insight into his own behaviour. ‘If we’re being honest,’ he says, ‘let’s be honest: I was motivated by greed and, more important, by narcissism: a sense of entitlement that runs deep in my genes and that I can’t seem to shake, no matter how ugly it makes me feel, some of the time.’ He acknowledges that his narcissism ‘can’t stomach too much guilt. It vomits back up rage.’ He finds he is able to relax when his girlfriend is away: ‘That’s the way you’re supposed to feel about your parents, not your lover. Not that I was an authority on either.’ ‘Know thyself,’ he says. But then adds: ‘Christ. I promised myself I’d make an effort to avoid sounding like a pretentious prick.’ By the end, he is able to acknowledge that ‘it has taken me a while to understand my own limitations.’ It’s important whether or not the
reader finds him an attractive character, because his personal journey is central to the book.

Another factor in Ethan’s self-discovery is his difficult relationship with his father. He says that after his mother died, he ‘felt like a pet that belonged to her, and that [his father] got stuck with.’ Others in earlier generations could have said something similar. The problematic relationship between parents and children, especially fathers and sons, is one of the book’s themes, and contributes to tying the stories of past and present together. It is this layering, and interest in the psychological makeup of his characters, that take this novel beyond the genre label. It’s a good novel, but hardly a great one.

Being about art, there are lots of references to various real as well as imaginary artists, the real ones mostly producing ‘outsider art’. This is also called art brut, meaning raw art – hence the pun in the English title, lost in the American one. Kellerman is also concerned with the nature of genius, which Ethan ‘sought by proxy’ but can never have. I like the English title better.

You can find more about Jesse Kellerman here. He is not to be confused with Faye or Jonathan Kellerman, both of whom write best-selling mystery stories. They are his parents.