Jane Smith is the young wife of a middle-class London university lecturer, her former professor. One day his public lecture is attended by a famous portrait painter, Vivian Young, who shortly asks if Jane will pose naked for him. Although Jane has profound misgivings, her husband, besotted with the idea of becoming acquainted with an artist he idolizes, encourages her to do so, and in the end, she agrees.
This is the premise behind YOUNG MOTHER WITH RED HAIR, the stunning, effortless debut from M. A. Dunn. It is fitting that, at a time when both the Brooklyn Museum and the Picasso Museum in Paris are staging retrospectives problematizing the legacy of that notoriously sociopathic and misogynistic artist, Dunn takes as their subject the way in which artistic genius so often enables the possessor to take advantage of and manipulate those around them. From the descriptions of his paintings, Dunn’s artist, Vivian Young, works in the style and manner of the great British portraitist Lucian Freud (an allusion that may in fact be the one intended – the first names Lucian and Vivian bear more than a passing resemblance). He is a former bohemian, but with a small retinue of hangers-on – a “Pompadour” and a “Boswell” – and a knack for seduction, not to mention retreating behind his canvas when Jane asks him a question he cannot answer or tolerate. Yet he is also generous, a family man (of a kind), and unexpectedly warm towards Jane as their sessions go on – even if only in pursuit of his own artistic and emotional gratification.
It is, of course, also a book about his sitter. Dunn portrays Jane as a young mother, insecure in learned ways about her body and her freckles, and in the early stages of a failing marriage, yet disapproving of the circle in which Young moves, with its casual infidelities and its elastic attitudes towards social mores – not so much his world, Young defensively retorts, so much as how the world is. When it comes to description, Dunn has the acuteness of Orwell the novelist, and is attentive, as he was, to smell – more particularly, the scent of people – just as much as touch and sight. The interplay between Jane and Young is mesmerizing, as they move towards sex and then burst right through it, the act seeming less important than the sense of self-affirmation it describes. The awful realizations – of the illusion of closeness, of exclusivity as Young’s seemingly sole sitter – are punches to the solar plexus.
Engrossing from start to finish, M. A. Dunn’s YOUNG MOTHER WITH RED HAIR is often unsettling, sometimes affirmatory, and occasionally sinister and yields queasy insights into what it means to exert power through genius.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader