It’s the early 1950s and Liza Baker has come to New York to study art and become a painter. After taking lessons from the much admired German modernist Hans Hofmann she finds herself at the heart of the burgeoning abstract expressionist movement rubbing shoulders with artists such as William de Kooning and Franz Kline. Galleries begin to show interest and a gentle rivalry emerges between Liza and her on/off boyfriend Hank Bolton. A drunken one night stand with a stranger results in Liza getting pregnant and she decides that she can keep the baby and continue to build her career. After the birth of her daughter Rouge, the doors of opportunity begin to close and she realizes that in the male-dominated art world being a woman with talent isn’t enough to get you taken seriously. As Liza watches Hank Bolton’s career soar she slips into a world of teaching and drinking and seemingly failing to be a good mother.
There’s a famous quote from the British literary critic Cyril Connolly that runs, “there is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall” and THE GLIMPSE, a hugely impressive debut novel from Lis Bensley certainly illuminates the struggle that many aspiring artists have found in trying to juggle family responsibilities with the precarious nature of a creative career. What Bensley does exceptionally well is highlight the problems caused by the patriarchal expectations of the period in which the book is set and, by doing so with subtle understatement, makes clear that these gender inequalities remain ever present. The chauvinistic attitudes against which Liza is trying to carve her career are demonstrated in the words of her teacher Hofmann who believes women are only good artists until they fall in love, in the boorish behavior of the male artists in the Cedar Tavern in which her group socializes, and in the words of her one time love Bolton who states that he hates children and that they have no place in a serious artist’s world. By the time the novel has moved forward a decade or so to show Rouge as a teenager, Bolton’s career has reached the point where he is featured on the cover of Life magazine and has been the subject of numerous international exhibitions. Liza is floundering, her relationship with her daughter fraught, her relationships with men frequently drunken and fleeting.
Bensley manages to replicate a period of art and social history that is unerringly accurate in terms of the characters with whom she populates her novel. At the end of the book she lists the works she used as research and numerous real world artists, such as Rothko and Pollock, loom large. It’s difficult to write well about art and particularly so in describing a fictitious artist’s work. Bensley’s description of Liza’s paintings is exemplary. She succeeds in describing the feeling of the work, its emotional weight, the power of its gesture and the subtlety or brutality of its markings without getting weighed down by attempting to simply describe what is on the canvas. No two readers would ever be able to agree on what Liza’s paintings actually look like but every reader will be able to engage with the essence of the work and understand the artist’s intentions (and disappointments). Bensley’s approach is bold and brave and works superbly.
Aside from writing about artistic struggle, THE GLIMPSE is also a beautifully nuanced study of the relationship between a mother and her teenage daughter. If the earlier narrative of failing to make it in New York is told in broad strokes then the second half of the novel turns on seemingly slight but emotionally intense moments. A guiding hand on a shoulder. The discovery of a sketch of a child sleeping. The glance in the mirror when Rouge sees herself as others may see her for the first time. The title for the book comes from a de Kooning interview from 1960 where the artist is explaining to the great art critic David Sylvester how the tiniest of moments can be the most important, “Content, if you want to say, is a glimpse of something, an encounter, you know, like a flash…” Bensley understands this and THE GLIMPSE is a delightfully subtle book and its content manages to resonate long after its final page.
In THE GLIMPSE, Lis Bensley paints an incredibly moving and emotionally engaging story of an artist who is struggling to find her way. A sophisticated, unsentimental and beautifully written story of art, empowerment and the bonds of maternal love.
~Kent Lane for IndieReader