What I Loved

Novelist, poet, and essayist Siri Hustvedt has written about art, literature, and neuroscience for critical and academic audiences. In What I Loved, she uses her protagonist Leo Hertzberg to convey a more personal narrative exploring these same obsessions. Infused with a psychological interest in memory and perception, What I Loved could easily be renamed What I Lost. A retired art historian, Leo, recounts the 25-year deterioration of his marriage and erosion of his friendship with the couple upstairs: Bill, a painter, and his wife, Violet, the subject of his paintings. Leo and those he loves are preoccupied with questions of artistic authenticity and professional ambition, even in their most intimate moments. Beginning in the 1970s and carrying through to the present, the contemporary art world emerges as a seductive, cutthroat landscape, home to critical evisceration, familial betrayal, and startling violence enacted in the name of fleeting commercial success. The subjects of the characters' artistic and academic examinations, ranging from fairy tales to eating disorders, express starved and indulged emotional impulses. Yet Leo's karmic punishment far exceeds his transgressions. While one later storyline feels overwrought with repetitious dramas involving teenage theft and drug use, the book's relationships are richly felt, its prose sensually brainy, the suspense palpable. Hustvedt brings intelligent, nuanced perspective to her ill-fated characters.