Customer Reviews

Black & White

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

BLACK & WHITE by Dana Shapiro

April 28, 2007

Rating ***** (5 Stars)

Clara Brodeur is estranged from her mother and older sister, but her friends and family that have known her since she left home do not know the reason why. Only her husband has some idea what Clara went through as a child, the daughter of a prominent photographer in New York. BLACK & WHITE is the story of a woman's relationship with her famous mother, Ruth Dunne.

Against her better judgment, Clara goes alone to New York to see her mother, who is now ill and is on her deathbed, leaving her children and devoted husband at home. It is Clara's sister Robin that convinces Clara to make this emotionally difficult journey back to her roots, in which memories still haunt her to this day, as she tries to live a life that is totally apart from what she had experienced by the hands of her mother.

Ruth Dunne was a struggling photographer/artist years ago, with two children under the age of 6 and a devoted husband. When Ruth is 'discovered' by a friend of her husband's, she is told that her photographs are good but they lack something. So she tries something different. When she sees her younger daughter Clara, who at the time was three years old, naked in the tub with a plastic frog in her mouth, Ruth takes the photograph, and soon her photography career takes off. Known as the CLARA SERIES, these photographs take New York by storm, and make Ruth a genius in the eyes of the art world.

But there is controversy, as critics and the public argue whether these photographs are art, or on the edge of pornography. From the age of three through fourteen, Clara is Ruth's muse, and is the center of all her most famous and critically acclaimed work.

And underneath it all, Ruth's family is falling apart. Clara struggles with the idea of being the center of such attention, never feeling comfortable with the nude portraits, but never knowing how to say "no" to her mother. Robin feels she's the neglected daughter, and this feeling carries over into adulthood, as the two sisters deal with their relationship to each other and to their dying mother. Their father never approved of the photographs, and tries his best to protect Clara, but Ruth finds ways to sneak out of the house to photograph her, usually when he is away on business.

When Clara finally runs away from home because she's finally had it, she separates herself from her family and makes a new life for herself, eventually moving to a small town with her new husband. In her new life, Ruth Dunne does not exist, and Clara has no plans of telling her daughter Sam about this icon in the world of photography --- that is, until she receives word that her mother is dying.

BLACK & WHITE is told in flashbacks, detailing Clara's childhood and her life with her family growing up. Now that she's reunited with her sister and mother, she needs to decide how to live out the rest of her life, whether to acknowledge her past with Ruth, whether to let her daughter know who she really is. There are many issues that Clara has to deal with before her mother dies, including what happened to her at the hands of her mother and whether she can forgive Ruth. Clara also needs to decide whether to include her mother, on her deathbed, into her life, now that her life includes a husband and a daughter. Conflicts between the two sisters are also at hand. The main theme of the story is that of forgiveness and acceptance. I found BLACK & WHITE a very intense novel, and a fast read. I had enjoyed FAMILY HISTORY by Dani Shapiro a few years ago, and eagerly picked up BLACK & WHITE, expecting to read yet another wonderfully written book about the relationships and intricacies that make up a family. I think I enjoyed BLACK & WHITE even more, which is saying a lot. I highly recommend this book.

Black & White is incredibly well-written and enjoyable to read. Shapiro's descriptions of the photo shoots, while disturbing, are captivating. The reader can visualize the scenes (and the characters) so easily. In my opinion, the image of Clara's father is the most heart-breaking; all he wanted to do was protect his daughter and her innocence from the masses. While I was surprised by the minimal sympathy I felt for Ruth near the end, I was never entirely convinced that she deserved it. I'm sure the book will leave readers debating Ruth's motives and her love for her children.

Black and White is the first of Dani Shapiro's novels I've read, and I found it riveting. The excellent writing is very descriptive, which allowed my mind to be fully transported to the two main settings, an L.L. Bean version of a Maine island in winter and the black-clad gallery world of Manhattan. The rich texture of Shapiro's writing shines through with minute detail. She creates nearly every scene with a 360-degree view. This quality added to my ability to imagine the expensive and much-studied photographs upon which the story revolves: The Clara Series, by Ruth Dunne.

Character driven, this is primarily Clara's story. She's a 32-year old mother of a 9-year-old daughter, Sammy, and wife of jewelry artisan, Jonathan. After 14 years of self-imposed exile from her famous mother, the photographer Ruth Dunne, and her older sister, an uptight attorney named Robin, she's called back to Manhattan because of her mother's grave illness. Clara's relationship with her mother and her struggle as she returns is the central plot. From ages 3-14, Clara had served as Ruth's muse and model and grew up with all eyes upon her, judging, assessing and commenting on the black and white nude photographs that made her mother a star. Ruth never asked permission . . . Clara suffered and at 18, just before she obtained her high school diploma, ran away. Her mother's cancer and her sister's request that she return to help, forces her to come of out hiding. This return to the fold exposes her secrets and her fears. She must not only face her mother and her sister, she must face herself.

It's a quick read, a satisfying story and has fantastic character development of each character, major and minor. Highly recommend.

Michele Cozzens, Author of A Line Between Friends and The Things I Wish I'd Said.

I loved this book. Other reviewers have sufficiently explained the story line, so I will stick with what more of a thematic review. The overarching principle of the book is that there is no such thing as simple black and white (right/wrong, love/hate) in relationships. Life is nuanced, as are our decisions and motivations. It would be simple to write off Ruth as a horrible selfish mother who didn't love her daughter, but SHapiro avoided the easy, cliche characterizations and offered us a family that had love despite the tensions that tore them apart.

Shapiro wrote vivid, accessible characters -- they are not simply good or bad either. For instance, Peony (Ruth's assistant) drove me crazy but I could also understand that she acted out of loyalty to Ruth. Clara's hurt and anger towards her mother was understandable, but there were still times when I wanted her to just get OVER herself. Every character, with perhaps the exception of Clara's father, had a carefully balanced character. (as a side note, Clara's husband and father are perhaps the most idealized characters. This is very much a book about mothers, daughters and sisters, more so than about the men who love them.)

The one weakness I found in the book was that the dates are not accurate. Clara is in 4th grade in 1982 (two years after John Lennon was killed) but then is in September of 7th grade when the iconic Vogue cover featuring the Lacroix jacket and faded jeans comes out. THat issue was actually Anna Wintour's first issue as EIC and came out in November 1988 -- Clara would have been in 11th grade in 1988.

Great storyline, but I expected more from the writing/writer (maybe that is the problem with being a big fan of one of the writer's previous books,Family History: A Novel, also a novel about mother/daughter relationship). I gave it three stars because of the great characterization of Ruth Dunne and for the story line. Couldn't give more because I couldn't stand the number of question marks in each page: everything Clara thinks/does is preceded by a question the character puts to herself (you could just remove all these questions and still have the same feeling about the doubts/questions in Clara's mind).

I thought "Black & White" was a very excellent book. The characters were well developed and Shapiro's descriptions of the various scenes, especially the photo shoots, were exceptional. I could easily imagine the characters and the scenes in my mind. There are many reviews on this book so I won't clutter up the page with more detail except to reveal that the story focuses on the relationship between the mother, Ruth Dunne, a noted photographer and her daughter Clara. And then there is the conflict between Clara and her sister, Robin. Clara runs away from home vowing never to return; starts a new life, gets married and becomes a mother, herself. Later in the novel the mother becomes very ill and Alone, Clara makes the difficult trip to New York to see Ruth. There is an attempt for reconciliation and forgiveness and toward the end of the book emotions run high in this family. I found this part very intense. Overall I enjoyed the novel very much and I thought Dani Shapiro created an excellent story.

Clara was used/abused as a nude model for her mother's photographs which brought fame to mom and embarrassment and pain to Clara. The novel explores Clara's relationship to her estranged mother, now near death, as well as her sister, husband and daughter. For a short novel this book had a lot of depth. The psychological struggles between Clara and her mother, daughter, husband and sister were portrayed well. We find out just how far Clara's mother is willing to go for her art and it is pretty shocking. My one complaint without giving anything away was Clara's actions at the end. I did not find them in line with what took place through the rest of the book but cannot even take away one star for it, the rest of the book is that good.

Clara (Dunne) Brodeur, the conflicted protagonist of Dani Shapiro's engrossing "Black + White," suffers from a unique identity crisis. As a parent and wife, she is insecure, hesitant and full of self-reproach; hers is a life reflecting self-effacement. As a child, she served as the model for a series of nude portraits taken by her famous photographer mother, Ruth Dunne. Never consenting to her mother's decade-long practice, Clara could not articulate the sense of fear, alienation and self-abdication that plagued her childhood. The trauma never disappears, but mutates into a gnawing sense of worthlessness, despite the fame and notoriety her image generated.

In Shapiro's confident hands, Clara's sufferings elicit both a sense of compassion and outrage. Each member of the Donne family responds differently to the photographic series. Clara's older sister withdraws, chastened by a sense of abandonment and jealousy, at one envious of Clara's absorption by Ruth and repelled by the perverse attention paid her sister. Nathan, Clara's father, swallows his sense of outrage and resolves to protect his daughter as best he can. Ruth is a more complicated character. Shapiro refuses to characterize the photographer/mother in simple terms. Instead, Ruth is a series of questions, most of which revolve round an artist's obligation to aesthetic truth and a mother's obligation to protect her child.

In her previous works, Shapiro consistently has probed the consequences of trauma and abandonment on family coherence. "Black + White" is a masterful continuation of that exploration. The author, perhaps from her own experiences, knows how a child who has not sought the limelight would withdraw from life, to silently resent the very people whom a child should most love. Shapiro's own tormented family history provided her the opportunity to gain painful understandings as to how a young girl copes with the feelings of neglect and the paradoxical invisibility that accompany unsolicited fame.

It is through Clara that Shapiro gives voice to all children who have felt wronged by a parent. Confronting her dying mother, Clara rejects her mother's explanation that the nude photographs are but manifestations of art, of a photographer's passion for truthful expression; the daughter, who "digs her nails into the soft flesh of her palm," rails, "You stole me away from myself!" Fourteen years after she ran away from her New York home, the bruised adult realizes that her past "has never gone away...[and] is alive inside of them." Bewildered, frightened and alone, Clara ponders an unanswerable question: "Was there a place in the world for someone like her? A special place -- a lost land of child muses?"

Sequestered and isolated in a remote, small Maine village, comforted by a loving husband, Clara is aware that she somehow doesn't "get" what being a mother is. Guilty that "she was posing" at being a parent, she feels that other woman belong to a "secret club of motherhood," that "these mothers come from childhoods that had prepared them" for the responsibilities of raising a child. Fittingly, it is Clara's young daughter, Sam, who compels Clara to confront, understand and accept both her past and present.

There are never any easy answers for those who have suffered as children, no instantaneous cures, no guaranteed paths to recovery. The reclamation of humanity for those who lost both innocence and identity as kids requires enormous courage and hope. Dani Shapiro's greatest gift in her gripping and challenging "Black + White" is her advocacy of how vital it is to reclaim what was lost.

I really enjoyed the story until the ending which seemed both out of character for the protagonists and very abrupt. It really had the quality of "Then they all went off to the seashore". The end made the text up to that point seem to be a lie or seemed a lie itself. I thought that it was a good story with a good conflict but, unfortunately, a very poor resolution.

I bought this book two days ago and finished it last night. Dani Shapiro Is one of my favorite authors and this book reminded me why. It's the story of a daughter who is robbed of her youth and innocence by her self-seeking artist mother. I couildn't put it down.