Catharine Savage Brosman is highly respected for her elegant poetry as well as for her scholarship in French literature and Louisiana literature. She is professor emerita of French at Tulane University, having held the Gore Chair in French at that institution. After such a career, she might well sit back, relax, and enjoy the views she describes so well, a good cocktail in hand. Instead, she publishes this, a collection of seventeen short stories, every one of which contains an epiphany of human truth. I have not read so fine a work of American fiction in decades. The characters and situations in this book will remain with me for the rest of my life.
There is a cast of characters who reappear in the stories, including the same narrator throughout, almost producing the effect of a novel—except for the fact that the stories are not organized chronologically in the life of the narrator. The result is a kaleidoscopic revelation of the narrator herself as a character. She is a painter and a professional art historian working as a curator at a fictional New Orleans art museum, frequently traveling to France and Austria for work and for pleasure. And then there is the American Southwest, a magical place to which she loves to withdraw for camping and hiking expeditions. The atmospheres of all these venues are conjured up with a combination of piercing insight, aesthetic sensibility of the highest order, and sheer sensual experience, all conveyed in prose that is revelatory in a nearly Proustian fashion. This is not merely a poet’s prose, although there are poetically charged passages; it is the fully developed artistic medium of a master of fiction.
In dealing with the art and museum worlds, Brosman presents a panoply of pretentious, even completely phony poseurs, at least one of whom is outright psychotic (in “A Little Nightcap,” a terrifying yet amusing story that is a unique variation on the mystery genre). Such persons are rife in these areas, especially at a time when there are no accepted standards for what is “beautiful” or “good,” and yet certain “postmodern theories”—usually just cited as “theory,” as if they were the only ones in existence—command lip service from young scholars hoping to gain tenure in academia or prestigious curatorial positions in the museums. Norma Wurmser, in “Virtual Art,” is a perfect portrait of the type who succeeds in such an atmosphere. Despite a lack of solid knowledge about artistic photography, she manages to worm herself into the directorship of the museum’s photography department and goes on to dominate her colleagues by organizing a conference on the bogus topic “Indo-European Technological Evidence on Women and Art.” The mere use of the word women ensures that even the suspicious director of the museum cannot say no.
Then there is the wonderful Julius Wallace in “The Thomas Grant,” clumsy, awkward, hyper-anxious (with a flying phobia, for example), yet a true scholar of Mesopotamian and other ancient art. His colleagues, seeing past the surface to the man’s underlying sincerity and admiring his undoubted scholarship, band together to help him obtain travel money in response to an invitation to pursue research in Europe. This character was painful for me, yet compelled a certain self-deprecatory enjoyment, because I am afraid I recognized certain of his characteristics in myself . . .
Another character whose portrait moves gently but rigorously inward, from surface to innermost soul, is that of Cyprien in “A Day with Cyprien.” The narrator meets with a French friend from thirty years ago, now a museum curator in Bordeaux, who comes up to Paris to see her. Together they visit a museum dedicated to the eighteenth century, displaying such painters as Hubert Robert and Francesco Guardi. But as the day unfolds, it is not memories or great art that galvanize Cyprien’s feelings and therefore the narrator’s enriched grasp of his nature, but a seemingly trivial incident, his loss of his glasses (one of several pairs he always carries with him). The day is transformed into a hunt for them through the labyrinthine Parisian Métro system, to no avail—until they appear, almost miraculously, perched on a car parked in the street. Cyprien must have dropped them, and some good Samaritan picked them up and placed them on the car. Cyprien’s relief is so great that his anxiety is transformed into a joy that even the ebullient capriccios of Guardi could not inspire in him.
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