What I Loved: A Novel [Paperback]

Siri Hustvedt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2004

What I Loved begins in New York in 1975, when art historian Leo Hertzberg discovers an extraordinary painting by an unknown artist in a SoHo gallery. He buys the work; tracks down the artist, Bill Wechsler; and the two men embark on a life-long friendship. Leo's story, which spans twenty-five years, follows the growing involvement between his family and Bill's--an intricate constellation of attachments that includes the two men, their wives, Erica and Violet, and their sons, Matthew and Mark.

The families live in the same New York apartment building, rent a house together in the summers and keep up a lively exchange of ideas about life and art, but the bonds between them are tested, first by sudden tragedy, and then by a monstrous duplicity that slowly comes to the surface. A beautifully written novel that combines the intimacy of a family saga with the suspense of a thriller, What I Loved is a deeply moving story about art, love, loss, and betrayal.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The ardent exchange of ideas underlies all manner of passionate action in Hustvedt's third novel (after The Enchantment of Lily Dahl), a dark tale of two intertwined New York families. "What is memory's perspective? Does the man revise the boy's view or is the imprint relatively static, a vestige of what was once intimately known?" So muses Columbia University art historian Leo Hertzberg as he recalls the love affair between artist Bill ("Seeing is flux") Wechsler and his model/second wife, Violet, whom Leo secretly loves almost as much as his own wife, Erica. Leo and Bill become friends when Leo buys a huge portrait of Violet, the first painting Bill has ever sold, and the two are inseparable ever after. Erica and Bill's first wife, Lucille, give birth to sons in the same year and, soon afterward, the Wechslers buy a loft in the same SoHo building. When the boys are four, Bill and Lucille are divorced, and Bill marries Violet. Linked by their love of art and language (Erica is an English professor and Violet a Ph.D. student with a specialty in 19th-century forms of madness), the two couples talk insatiably about art and life, celebrating triumphs and weathering tragedy together. In its second half, the novel shifts into the terrain of the psychological thriller, as Bill and Lucille's son, Mark, a dangerously charming boy, grows up and slips into a sinister New York club scene. So solid and complex are Hustvedt's characters that the change in pace is effortlessly effected-the plot developments are the natural extension of the author's meticulous examination of relationships and motives. In considering Violet, Leo observes, "Unlike most intellectuals, [she] didn't distinguish between the cerebral and the physical." The same distinctions are blurred in this gripping, seductive novel, a breakout work for Hustvedt.-- didn't distinguish between the cerebral and the physical." The same distinctions are blurred in this gripping, seductive novel, a breakout work for Hustvedt.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

After buying an astonishing painting in a SoHo gallery, art historian Leo Hertzberg tracks down the artist, Bill Wechsler, and they launch a lifelong friendship with all the attendant joys and sorrows. There's great in-house enthusiasm for Hustvedt's third novel.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Picador; Reprint edition (March 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312421192
• ISBN-13: 978-0312421199
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (73 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #76,894 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Siri Hustvedt is the author of four novels, The Sorrows of an American, What I Loved, The Blindfold, and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, as well as two collections of essays, A Plea for Eros and Mysteries of the Rectangle. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Paul Auster.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars What I Loved About This Novel January 25, 2007

By H. F. Corbin TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

There is much to love about Siri Hustvedt's ambitious novel WHAT I LOVED, starting with the narrator, art historian Leo Hertzberg, who remembers at sixty the events of his life over the past 25 years and those persons he loved, his wife Erica and their fragile child Matthew; his best friend Bill Wechsler, a New York artist and his second wife Violet; and Bill's child Mark by his first wife Lucille, a child whom Leo would like to love. Leo is the most decent of people and all too human, as we watch him grow old and experience what all or most of us will face: love, disappointment in love, the deaths of those we hold most dear, the sometimes seemingly impossibility of relationships, and finally old age and disease associated with it. Ms. Hustvedt's other characters pulse with life and passion as well. In a story that covers 25 years, we are bound to learn a lot about them as they become real to us.

Ms. Hustvedt's language is often beautiful, and her characters sometimes made profound statements about both art and life. Leo on marriage: "By then Erica and I had been together for over five years, and I often thought of our marriage as one long conversation." (As I recall Hillary Clinton said something similar about her life with Bill Clinton.) Leo's comments on nagging sound all too familiar: "But nagging is a strategy of the powerless, and there is nothing mysterious about it." Leo on age and memory: "The recollections of an older man are different from those of a young man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. . . We delete most of it [events in our life] to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die." The death of a loved one leaves a "gaping absence" in our lives. Finally there is a passage that comes close to poetry as Leo recalls only the second time he ever saw his mother weep as she holds a photo album in her hand: "She took my hands and answered me first in German, then in English. . . '"They are all dead.'" (p. 264)

Besides excellent character development and profound and beautiful language, Ms. Hustvedt also tells a good story that gradually becomes a psychological thriller. Who could ask for much more in a novel?

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars emotionally rich, sometimes distressing November 24, 2008

By Alan A. Elsner VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

Here is a big, ambitious novel about four talented, intelligent people -- artists and intellectuals in New York -- who first find love and friendship and then immense suffering. Bill, a talented and original artist, leaves Lucille, his emotionally stunted wife, for Violet, his passionate, vivacious model. Meanwhile their friends Leo and Erica live upstairs pursuing their own ecstatic marriage. The two couples have sons almost at the same time -- Mark and Matt. They vacation together in Vermont, they make love, enjoy food and good fellowship -- life is good.
And then two acts of unbearable tragedy occur (I won't reveal them) and everything is broken. One tragedy happens in an instant and provides the jarring fulcrum around which this book turns. The other occurs slowly over the course of years. The protagonists struggle to preserve their loves, the lives they have built, their sanity -- but the reality they face is too powerful. Everything falls apart; almost nothing survives the wreckage.
This is an absorbing and in many ways an admirable book. It is a novel of ideas that takes art seriously and brings it to life. There are dozens of other ideas woven through it -- about the nature of sickness, of reality, of truth. The writing is vivid, the characters psychologically convincing for the most part.
Yet there is a spiritual emptiness at the center of these lives, a sense of life imitating art rather than the other way around.
I found this novel impressive and occasionally shocking but I was not ultimately moved by it. It kept me at an emotional distance. I responded intellectually rather than feeling the joy and the pain. I admired its artistry a little too much.

19 of 24 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars A Disappointment April 6, 2004

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

I was so disappointed by this book.
The enthusiastic reviews I read made me believe this book was going to be something other than it was. In fact, the book itself tried to accomplish a similar sleight-of-hand. It sells itself -- both physically and in terms of the reviews but also in its outset -- as a traditional modern novel about the relationships between a group of adult friends. Hustvedt abandons this thread about halfway through the novel, choosing instead to turn it into a surreal detective story that's far too literally about investigation, absence and reality for my taste. It's two books mashed into one and unfortunately neither is successful. I've given it two stars because either of the books this one could have been would have been great; the writing is sharp and the characterizations vivid (though Bill I found one-note). I fear readers will be disappointed if they head into this work expecting a riveting modern novel; expect instead erudition and gamesmanship and the hollow feeling that comes at the end of the long, unfulfilling exercise of reading this book.