Studying painting and drawing --- strictly as an amateur, I
hasten to add --- has been a revelation to me...literally. It has
caused me to see more and to use my eyes differently. Elizabeth
Kostova’s THE SWAN THIEVES tunes into this visual enhancement
with a story of two artists separated by more than a century, but
linked in sensibility and tragedy. The most distinctive feature of
the book is the author’s evocation of their finely honed
perspective on everything from a well-loved face to an expanse of
ocean or a garden in winter (one painter, for example, has learned
to see that snow is never purely white and muses on how its colors
shift with the changing light).

Kostova also mines the public’s continuing fascination
with French Impressionism, that most surefire of art movements when
it comes to a blockbuster show or museum merchandising (who among
us has not indulged in --- or decried --- a Monet mug or Van Gogh
address book?). Mixing actual artists and imaginary ones, she
conjures the intimate world behind the radiant paintings.

The novel begins with what seems an entirely irrational act. A
well-known figurative painter, Robert Oliver, attempts to slash an
Impressionist canvas in Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery
of Art. Enter psychiatrist Andrew Marlow, the ideal therapist for
Oliver and the ideal narrator for us. As a doctor, he is trained to
observe; as a serious amateur painter, he can understand better
than most what drives the artist’s emotional life.
There’s only one problem: his new patient refuses to talk.
Given art supplies, Oliver does begin to draw and paint, but the
pictures --- nearly always of the same beautiful, mysterious woman,
in what looks to be 19th-century dress --- yield no immediate
insights.

Oliver’s other activity is to read and reread a set of old
letters in French. Marlow has the letters translated, and at that
point THE SWAN THIEVES begins to alternate Oliver’s modern
story with a correspondence from the 1870s between an artist named
Beatrice de Clerval Vignot and her great-uncle by marriage, a much
older man called Olivier Vignot (surely the similarity of names can
be no accident), also a painter. Although Olivier has a more
traditional aesthetic than his niece, a budding Impressionist, the
two form a deep attachment based as much on their shared passion
for art as on physical attraction.

Every love relationship in this book, in fact, is spurred on by
and intermingled with a lust for painting. Marlow --- who is as
determined a sleuth as he is a shrink --- tracks down
Oliver’s former wife, Kate, and his ex-lover, Mary. Both
clearly were seduced not just by the man himself but by his
brushwork and creative passion. But neither Kate nor Mary bears any
resemblance to the woman Oliver paints with such obsessive zeal,
over and over. Who is she? What is their connection?

As Marlow looks for answers, chasing down clues as far as Paris
and Acapulco, the links between past and present gradually emerge.
Perhaps, especially toward the end, some of the plot ends are a bit
too neatly tied up. But I liked Kostova’s leisurely pace
(unafraid to digress, she spends more than 10 quietly stunning
pages on a visit Marlow pays to his aging father) and lush,
slang-free writing, which suit both her subject and her thoughtful
characters.

Although Oliver and Marlow, locked in a silent battle of wills,
are central to THE SWAN THIEVES, the women in the book are just as
interesting and a lot angrier: “It’s a shame for a
woman’s history to be all about men --- first boys, then
other boys, then men, men, men,” says Mary. The saga of
Beatrice (who resembles the French Impressionist Berthe Morisot,
married with children, more than the transplanted American Mary
Cassatt, who remained single) hints at the complicated choices
female artists must make. Kate and Mary’s own painterly
ambitions and independent sense of self become submerged in their
love for the moody, charismatic Robert Oliver. When Kate’s
children were toddlers, she says, “My life was mostly touch
… I suppose [Robert’s] was color and line, so that we
couldn’t see each other’s worlds very
well….” Although I think that Kate and Mary are a bit
too similar as characters, they are so strong, attractive and
honest that the reader falls half in love with them (so does
Marlow).

It is an ambitious task for a novelist to invent an artist. How,
using words alone, can she create an imaginary body of work?
Leaving aside the old-fashioned genre of
artist-biography-as-fiction (LUST FOR LIFE; THE AGONY AND THE
ECSTASY), the best recent example I can think of is Siri
Hustvedt’s sophisticated, cerebral WHAT I LOVED, set in the
downtown New York art scene of the ’80s and ’90s. The
descriptions of her artist protagonist’s installations have
the ring of truth.

Kostova’s book is way more romanticized and conventional
than Hustvedt’s --- more Musée d’Orsay than chic,
experimental SoHo gallery. It is also entrancing, absorbing and
thoroughly readable. When Marlow is leaving the National Gallery,
he senses “that mingled relief and disappointment one feels
on departure from a great museum --- relief at being returned to
the familiar, less intense, more manageable world, and
disappointment at that world’s lack of mystery.” Upon
finishing THE SWAN THIEVES, I felt much the same way.