by Deirdre Madden (Faber and Faber, 2002)

Reviewed by F.M. Kennedy

Deirdre Madden's sixth novel, Authenticity, casts a cold eye over the relationship between art and reality. Its tone is detached and its language often stilted, but it's a book that grapples with big themes and gains upon reflection. Although focused on visual art, it is a novel that might be about any creative process, including writing itself.

The book's heroine, Julia, is a 25-year-old artist with extraordinary hair who lives in a grotty garret above an antique shop with her slightly alarming cat, Max. Her lover, the acclaimed artist Roderic Kennedy, has spent most of his forty-odd years surviving various crises: a stifling family, alcoholism, the consequent failure of his marriage and estrangement from his daughters. His relationship with Julia is simple and intense in its unassuming symbiosis. Until, that is, the day Julia stumbles across the distraught figure of William who is having a quiet nervous breakdown on a park bench in Stephen's Green. Or so we are led to believe by the blurb on the book jacket.

Don't judge this book by its cover, which says that Julia's meeting with William 'sets in motion a chain of events which, in the course of the following year, has dramatic and unforeseen consequences for all three of them.' This is not exactly true. There are no consequences that weren't already on the cards. Instead, Julia's encounter with William sparks the occasional tiff between Roderic and herself and more importantly, raises the main concern of the novel: What it is that makes an artist authentic and what happens if this authentic art is denied?

Roderic is an authentic artist. Moreover, he's a dark, brooding figure of a man with an enchanting way with women. He's a good listener. He's open hearted. He intimidates by both his physical size and his intelligence. All this and genius to boot? Never mind that Roderic is a recovering alcoholic, it only adds to his appeal. Some readers - and perhaps the author herself - will be smitten with this arty Heathcliff. As the novel moves seamlessly backwards and forwards in time and spaces that range from stuffy Dublin drawing rooms to fragrant Italian arbours, we bear witness to the effect art has had on Roderic's life - and the effect his art has had on the lives around him.

If Roderic is Madden's notion of an authentic artist, William is a cautionary example of what can happen when the 'real thing' is thwarted. When Julia first encounters him in Stephen's Green, William is contemplating suicide in the face of artistic failure. A lawyer with a carefully constructed life of Dalkey mansion, wife, two children, art collection and tasteful furnishings, he sees that it all amounts to nothing because he has denied his own artistic impulses. But any sympathy for William is quickly quenched by his hostile detachment from everyone in his life: wife, children, colleagues, and eventually even Julia. Although we are told that William is intelligent and agreeable company, he comes across as slightly sinister. Indeed, it is hard to feel much of anything for this man who displays the 'cold rectitude' Madden says is necessary to the artist, but not the 'courage of his gift.'

That artistic greatness requires a certain detachment is an interesting theory. In a very different novel, Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring, the Dutch painter Vermeer is portrayed as similarly - and necessarily - cold hearted in the name of his art. Yet in her terrific novel The Underpainter, Canadian author Jane Urquhart describes the cold eye of a successful artist less flatteringly. In that book, the main character's detachment distances him from what is real and true, from love.

Madden reaches discouraging conclusions when she examines whether the artist's vocation is compatible with family life. Roderic's marriage to an Italian art restorer sinks to the bottom of his grappa glass as he fails to reconcile the two - he thinks mutually exclusive - aspects of his life. Authenticity contains other examples of men (and only men) frustrated by the constraints of respectable career and family life. For instance, Roderic's brother, Dennis, has chosen to spurn both art and marriage, viewing the latter with particular distaste. Dennis gives up a budding career as pianist to pursue a life of anonymous offices, clever investments and the pleasures to be had peeling the 'papery pink skins' from garlic cloves. His escape from reality - or indeed his escape into reality - is following his father's ghost across the Wicklow mountains.

It is condescending to think of non-artists as incapable of seeing the world in a poetic way - as noted by Julia when she describes her father, a mechanic, as a true artist. Roderic distinguishes between real artists and people of technical ability but no vision. Madden appears to do the same with the 'cameo' appearance of Ray, a character who is a true artist in every way - dedication, hours, sacrifice - but ability. It's not the seeing that distinguishes the artist, nor even the ability, but the drive to represent the vision in some lasting way.

The dilemma of Art versus Reality that foxed the ancients rears its head repeatedly in Authenticity. Roderic describes a Turner painting of the Customs House as 'bringing [him] closer to reality' than the building itself. Similarly, the child Julia looks at a reproduction of a still life and thinks it 'realer than real things.' When she imagines the painter contentedly eating the pie once the painting was finished, her father suggests that the artist might simply have imagined the pie (somewhat unlikely in the case of a still life). The child Julia finds the idea of such an act of imagination 'more extraordinary still.' In other novels, the fact that a work of art can seem more real than life can have tragic consequences. For instance, in John Banville's The Book of Evidence, the woman in a painting the narrator steals is more real to him than the flesh-and-blood of the woman he bludgeons to death. But in Authenticity, the tragedy occurs when the reality of art is denied.

Although the scenes cited above make for compelling reading, some of the 'art talk' in the novel is likely to leave most readers cold. Unless extraordinary writing is employed, the act of describing abstract art is not unlike giving someone a blow-by-blow description of last night's dream: not as interesting as you might like to think. In particular, Julia's art sounds dreadful - at best 'derivative,' which is the way it is dismissed by a critic in the novel. Her artwork shifts through the course of the book from boxed objects behind glass to strips of billowing fabric to recording memories of the people who look at her art. The resonances are deafening.

Some of the best passages in Authenticity occur when characters experience moments of pure clarity, when life slips into the hyper-real, and the characters see and feel the reality behind things. There are also wonderful moments where the reverse happens and characters summon up the imaginary into reality. For instance, Dennis conjures up the ghost of their dead father to sit and drink a pint of stout with his two sons on a red leather banquette in a bar. Roderic dreams his ex-wife into a painting of martyrs in the Louvre, and watches as she leans out of the canvas to smash flagons and glasses accusingly across the floor. And in a bizarre moment, the ever-creepy William imagines a real woman into a nude painting in a gallery, until she rumbles him and tells him in no uncertain terms where to get off.

To give a novel the title Authenticity must mean that Madden has accepted the gauntlet of being assessed by the same criteria. Her lofty aims of exploring art, reality and love certainly measure up, but the elegant restraint of Madden's language often topples over into stiff formality, and thus unreality. Not every voice rings true. For instance, I don't believe two young brothers would speak to each other thus:

'Sorry to disturb you. I just wanted to ask do you know where my football is? I've looked everywhere.'

'I haven't seen it. You can borrow mine if you want, until such time as you find your own. It's in my room, in the usual place.'

The author is frequently heavy-handed in her observations‹some scenes are enough to prompt a chorus of creative writing groups into chants of 'show, not tell.' Although this diktat is not always correct, statements such as 'What Julia did not understand,' 'But at this time, Julia did not know' and 'He correctly guessed' irritate, because unless observations are seen or voiced through a character, it must be Madden herself waving from beyond the flyleaf.

For all that the language is constricted by detachment, the control that Madden has over the structure of the novel is impressive. She holds the idea of 'authenticity' like a crystal in her palm and examines it from every angle, letting light shine through the different stories onto the studio walls of Dublin, Italy, London and Paris, offering us the many flashes of lucidity that illuminate Authenticity.

The cool detachment of Authenticity makes it a hard novel to love. However, it is an interesting read. It is more intelligent than it is emotionally engaging, but that is probably the point. Is it necessary for the artist to keep some part of his/her soul separate and detached to be a great artist? Lord, I hope not.