Customer Reviews

The American Painter Emma Dial: A Novel

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1 star:		(3)

 

 

I loved this book. I finished it a few weeks ago and I can't stop thinking about it. The writing is beautiful: strong, intelligent, clean, almost fearless. There's also a gorgeous strength to the main character, Emma, and the writing reflected that strength perfectly. I re-read passages two, three, four times, because I didn't want to leave them behind. Samantha Peale takes us into the New York art world and the details of that world are fascinating. But the story is also very universal in that it allows a glimpse inside that quest for our creative soul and the search for who we are and where we stand in our community. I highly recommend this book for anyone who likes a gripping story and terrific writing.

Samantha Peale is especially adept at writing about power in the elite art world, in all its shifting forms--a dance between those who have it and those who want more of it; those who can purchase a ticket with their wealth, thus linking themselves; and those, like Emma Dial, on the periphery and in the background, who want to extricate art from power, in service to art, although for Emma, the two are complexly held together.

The maneuverings behind the scenes are adroitly written, in service to keeping the art titans firmly in place. Everything is measured in relation to this mix of art and power, including friendships; and, while many fall to the wayside, Emma Dial is at the brink, having to decide whether to continue to lose herself to the fiscally rewarding safety of her employer/lover's shadow, or to break away, by whatever means necessary, to the enormous risk of being an artist in her own right.

With Emma Dial, we're given a different kind of heroine: unsentimental, with a steady unwavering perceptive voice; hiding behind the reputation of her employer, doing the work while he receives the glory; able, yet insecure about the follow through, the blustery, ego-driven selling, that she knows is necessary; and, for the most part, two or three paces ahead of everyone else.

In the first half of this book, the descriptions of the daily life of a painter's assistant in downtown New York have a vividness, a suffused quality that places and people in your life take on when they are about to be irrevocably lost. The main character, Emma, is in a rut, yet Peale's writing makes her behavior and surroundings--smoking all night, listening to the same song over and over again, dinner with cherished, flawed friends--captivating to read. Our main character, maybe anti-hero, Emma, is not so much alienated as unsentimental, and this, I think we're meant to understand as her real promise as an artist. Her emotional vulnerability is not what propels the story or organizes the details. Rather, the book progresses the way the creative labor of painting and the creative labor of making a life for yourself progress. Once Emma gets out from under her mentor/boss/lover's successful and gorgeous shadow, the book shifts location and tone. From the character and detail-crowded setting of a very inhabited New York to a strongly-lit loneliness in Florida, where our heroine is a stranger. And Peale's description evokes the shifting moods of leaving, setting out, staring new, in her character. As someone who has lost one life and started another, I really related to Emma Dial. I've never read a description of the slow way you build a new life, the creative aspect of it, but also the sheer lonely will. I think of this book as a kind of answer to "The Awakening." That book ends with a woman who gave up everything for romantic love, and killed herself when it didn't work out. This book depicts a woman following her own vision of life, not a familiar romantic one, and the difficulty and necessity of realizing it.

It's been a long time since I found myself pulled along by a character and a story the way I found myself pulled along by The American Painter Emma Dial.

The book is set in the New York art world, which should be a forbidding, intimidating place, but Emma's voice is so assured, direct and so without affect that you soon are as at home in the setting as she has become after seven years working for a famed painter. And as off-hand about what the work of a famed painter's assistant turns out to be: making the actual paintings.

It's what Emma Dial does; that, and sleep with him, and otherwise render the services that she has allowed to waylay her own promise and ambition. The engine of the story is her craving to reclaim those, and break free of The Great Man. Which all might sound kind of internal and meditative, perhaps. So why was the only question I remember asking as I tore through the heart of the book: "What happens next?"

It's a cracking read, propulsive and yet as calm as Emma, who has an eye to match the author's ear. Reading writing like this is like drinking a glass of cold water when you didn't realize how thirsty you were.

If you read a book,it is always an investment of the most valuable capital: time. Once you start reading THE AMERICAN PAINTER EMMA DIAL you soon will notice that your investment was a good one and that you don't waste your time.You won't stop reading until you finished the book.
Samntha Peale brings you into the New York art world, but don't worry, even if you do not care much about the artistic milieu, Samntha Peale did not write an art-book or a book about art, she wrote about people working in the art business. And she did that brilliantly; not praising a hero or or condemning a villain, not pleading for a certain doctrine or fighting against an idiology.
Samantha Peale is an engaged spectator, describing people, sometimes critical, even sarcastic, and often very funny; never offending or vulgar and always with a great understanding for the strengths and weaknesses of human nature.
The story of a young woman, "who gave everything about her: her youth, her body, her talent,her commitment to painting to one man, and now wanted it all back"... is fascinating.
I read the book with pleasure and emotion and I shall not forget it. Hopefully we haven't to wait to long until Samantha Peale comes up with her next great novel.

As someone who has spent their adult life studying art history and attempting, however unsuccessfully, to create my own work, I really enjoyed this book. I would recommend it to anyone who has even the faintest interest in art. It provides great insight into the mind of a struggling artist.

I must differ with all the others who have posted reviews of this book. I found it a complete bore. Emma and her cohorts are so self-absorbed and manipulative as to be of no interest to me whatsoever. Nothing much happens here other than Emma moaning over her lack of artistic self-fulfillment, as she spends her days painting for her boss, artist extraordinaire, Michael instead of creating her own work. No one seems to be troubled at all by the morals of artists who sell their paintings for millions yet never put a brush to canvas, leaving the grunt work to studio assistants like Emma. When she isn't moaning over her fate, she smokes incessantly (I almost felt second-hand smoke coming off the page) and shuttles back and forth between her apartment, her unused studio and Michael's studio. Once in awhile there are stops at trendy bars, restaurants and parties. Finally after three-quarters of the book is over she consummates her relationship (of sorts) with Michael's major rival on the New York art scene, Philip, who she has obsessed over since the beginning of the book. The sex, like the book is a bore. Save your hard earned money and read something else.

Emma Dial inhabits the rarified world of New York contemporary art. An accomplished and talented painter, for the last six years Emma has been assistant to one of the greatest artists of the modern era, Michael Freiburg. That she is also his lover is not surprising, given Michael's charm and genius. More troubling is the fact that Emma, nearly thirty-two, has put aside her own gift to wield her brush in Freiburg's name: "I have been ruled by a superficial sense of competition." A studio inherited from a former teacher-mentor remains virtually unused as Emma spends long hours laboring over Michael's very successful and lucrative canvasses. Fortunately, Emma's creative instincts are reignited by a meeting with one of Freiburg's contemporaries, another brilliant painter, Phillip Cleary. Yet another attractive, powerful man for Emma to obsess over, at least Cleary wakes her up: "He made me feel competitive and agitated...I was not doing enough with my life."

A random assortment of characters color Peale's tale: Irene, a stunning, unmoored photographer; Idris, Irene's single-minded sculptor/boyfriend; and Hideki, another painter's assistant who works for one of Michael's rivals, an ex-wife. Her prose tinged with a Thomas Wolfian sense of class, Peale explores the New York art scene, the collectors and the artists, the galleries, the popular cafés and watering holes. All, including Emma, drift through the novel with a particular lack of animation. Although Emma reveals her life in detail, from the infrequent friendships to the lovers to the intimate moments with paint and canvas (the most believable), the author fails to make me care. Realizing she has lost her way, her talent lying fallow in service of other's commitments, Emma's disentanglement from the familiar is hardly dramatic, if personally satisfying, even frightening: "I was done being enthralled with other painters for a while."

I know little about this esoteric world where Emma struggles to reclaim her voice, nor the kind of charismatic older men to whom she is drawn to. It is interesting, revelatory, but Peale fails to incite any real passion in her characters, a group of self-involved individuals who value celebrity and financial success, as predictable as their trendy eateries, designer clothing and casual affairs. Even Emma's penchant for junk food or chronic monitoring of an obscure website is pretentious, although I'm sure it was meant to be idiosyncratic. I read this novel as a voyeur, content when I finish to put these characters aside. Luan Gaines/2009.

In my opinion, Ms. Peal's novel has one strength and one serious flaw. The strength is the result of her own experience, having studied art at the prestigious Art Institute in Chicago. This gives the novel the authenticity that it possesses. The flaw lies in the cast of characters with which she populates her book. These are a collection of shallow, narcissistic, pretentious and unsympathetic people with talent to burn and little else. IN addition to that, though, the reader is supposed to relate to Emma, who we are made to understand has enormous potential but lacks the courage (?), confidence (?), ambition (?) to break away from her $100,000/yr. job executing the paintings of Michael, her shallow, narcissistic, pretentious and unsympathetic middle aged lover who is also one of the two most famous living painters. By the end of the book, Emma has taken the other most famous living painter as her lover in Michael's place. So Emma, having been badly used by Michael (he gets millions for the paintings, she, a mere $20K) and for all the sympathy that we might feel for her as a result of the bad history we are told of concerning her mother, is a serial exploiter herself. Of course, we aren't supposed to think that. Rather, it's her awesome talent as much as her body that these two middle-aged men find so attractive. Right.

What is good here is the view the novel gives us into the world of art collecting. I must say, however, that other than Emma (mostly), I didn't like or care about anyone in the novel (both of her two famous lovers are morally corrupt). In addition,I often found the dialogue confusing and unconvincing.

I REALLY wanted to like this book. I wish it had been better.

It's not much of a story. Here's the plot: Emma Dial was a very promising art student who is growing old while making a good living as a studio assistant for a famous artist. The good living keeps her from making her own art. Her creative juice is nourishing her boss' reputation, not her own. That's about the sum total of the plot. What artist / writer / sculptor / playwrite do we know that's not been in that situation?

This was a tough read because I wanted to just reach through the book, take Emma by the shoulders, and shake her initiative into action. I realized along the way that my own resolve needs a good shaking.

This book makes the reader see in themselves their wasted, suppressed, overwhelmed, underdeveloped creative lives and can maybe give a new spark to them. If you are a creative person whose creativity is mired in mundane tasks and economic practicalities, read this book! You will see yourself; you will examine yourself; your impatience with Emma may translate into action to meet your own creative needs.