A singer, a writer, a painter and an actor have each lived their lives with varying degrees of success and the occasional brush with fame. Now, as the years have passed, they find themselves on the slow fade into loneliness, obscurity and bitter regret. In each of their hearts, and the single spark that keeps them alive, is the belief in the transformative power of art. When a mysterious woman enters their orbit will her charms be sufficient to revive their fortunes or is she more sinister femme fatale than muse?
UNUSUAL NOVEL: The Absurd Life of the Artist uses a split narrative across alternating chapters to tell the story of four seemingly unconnected artistic souls and their melancholic lives in different cities across the globe. As the novel progresses these characters are gradually drawn together in a plot that uses elements of the crime thriller, including stolen paintings, gangsters and a kidnapping with each strand triggered by the appearance of a beautiful stranger. Provocative and intoxicating, across numerous cities and in a variety of glamorous locations including concert halls, galleries and the bedrooms of high end hotels the woman casts her spell. As author Izidore K. Musallam describes her: “She had the complexion of a night-blooming lily, but above it all, her manner as much as her looks turned men’s hearts into hope.”
Though there is much to enjoy in the brisk, fast cut styling of Musallam’s prose, particularly in the early, more lyrical chapters where he is able to evoke the languid ennui of the terminally cool faded artists in their Rome and Paris and New York abodes, UNUSUAL NOVEL never quite hangs together as a cohesive whole. The characters, though reasonably well drawn, fare better when they are wallowing in their own miseries rather than when they are forced by the machinations of the somewhat convoluted plot to interact. A case in point being the extended, and often strained, dialogue sequences where characters appear to be talking at each other rather than having any real, meaningful conversation. Just as the novel seems to be drifting to an otherwise predictable ending, the last minute introduction of a monkey, as seen on the cover of the book, sparks some moments of welcome weirdness.
The author has written and directed a number of successful films and as the novel progresses his prose begins to shift into a style more in keeping with a script or film treatment. Peripheral characters are introduced in block capitals WAITER, CONDUCTOR etc etc and descriptions are kept to a bare minimum as if the author were giving instructions on how to dress a film set rather than evoke a location. And perhaps this shift in style reveals Musallam’s true intention. As a prose work UNUSUAL NOVEL is sometimes frustratingly incoherent, but underneath its disjointed plot there is enough intrigue and energy to suggest that it could make a better movie than a novel.
Izidore K. Musallam’s UNUSUAL NOVEL: The Absurd Life of the Artist is an intriguing, though sometimes frustratingly incoherent novel that focuses on the slow fade of four once successful artists.
~Kent Lane for IndieReader