When this year’s Pen/Faulkner Award went to Kate Christensen’s The Great Man, the decision was announced as a departure. Rather than look for artistic subtlety or social significance, the committee simply chose the book they most enjoyed. In doing so, they picked a novel by a woman–not for the first time, but still a departure from the norm.

Christensen’s novel combines satire and comedy of manners in a story of a deceased painter, Oscar Feldman, as he’s remembered by his wife, his sister, and his mistress–or one of his mistresses. In the decade of abstraction (the 1960s), Oscar stuck with representation, painting nudes of whoever would take it off. Now, five years into the grave, he is about to be memorialized by two young (and male) biographers. Their inquiries elicit the memories that are the novel’s substance.

Their probing results in revelations concerning the origins of one of Oscar’s most famous works. Mainly, though, the novel is about the present-day feelings of the surviving women and the adjustments they make as they get on with their lives. If you like hearing women in their eighties talk about getting laid, you might have fun with some of this. But conversations over lunch extend for pages, spiced with loving descriptions of the lemon butter, the asparagus, and the escargot, and “yes” is never a one-word response.
Christensen knows the art world, and there’s good satire in some of the talk about painters and styles. If you suspect that much of what we hear about artistic intentions is bull, and if you know anything about Jackson Pollack of Ed Keinholtz, you’ll find moments to enjoy. But when the purpose of a novel is to unearth a banality, and when this purpose is repeated often enough with no higher wisdom offered as an antidote–then the banality rubs off on the novel itself. What could have been good fun as a novella becomes tedious at over 300 pages. Minimalism has its place in writing as in the other arts, and there’s way too much paint on this canvas.

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