What I Loved: A Novel (Hardcover)

by Siri Hustvedt (Author) "YESTERDAY, I FOUND VIOLET'S LETTERS TO BILL..." (more)
Key Phrases: New York, Uncle Leo, Teddy Giles (more...)

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.

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; 1st edition (March 6, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805071709
• ISBN-13: 978-0805071702
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (58 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #588,408 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Parallels, intertexts and brilliance, May 12, 2005

By	Nathan Hobby (Perth, Western Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: What I Loved: A Novel (Paperback)

This book ran me over with its restrained intensity, its insight, and its near-perfect execution. Here are my splattered thoughts.

She is married to my favourite author, Paul Auster, and yet until now I have not read her. I may have to admit she is as good as him, or better. I wonder if they get insecure.

Indeed, it's got the same themes as some of Auster's work - two artistic couples pulling against each other, the love and friendship and lust, and (sometime) infidelities [a common source?] - and I'm thinking here particularly of Auster's work in Leviathan, a companion novel in so many ways.

In fact, if Auster had put his name to What I Loved, I would have accepted without question that he'd written it.

But the book, her not him; indeed, I meet more people who have read her than him, and I may be jealous.

I wanted to write about the ironic couplings: she writes about Leo writing about Bill who has painted a picture of Violet which he calls 'Self Portrait'. Leo/Siri comments how the title gets us thinking about the nature of selfhood, and how a portrait of another person of another gender could possibly be a self portrait. We the readers can add another level - how can Siri write so convincingly and reveal so much of her soul through the eyes of a male art critic (Leo) writing of his friendship with a male painter (Bill)?

I like the scope of the book; it isn't a simple narrative, it has the breadth and complexity of life. It is twenty five years in the lives of the two couples, which are really two and a half couples, since Violet displaces Lucille, and then really it's about their sons anyway, Matthew and Mark (I was expecting Luke and John, but the pun was only superficial, or only co-incidental.)

And the last section made the novel feel like a Brett Easton Ellis novel told from the pov of one of the sane characters. There is the same shifting identities, extremities of violence, sex and drugs. The same world, it seemed to me. Only in New York do these things happen, you see.

And it got me wondering as to whether Siri and Paul know Brett, and what they think of his work. Because they might hate it, or they might like it.

The crazed 'artist', Teddy Giles, and his favourite movie Psycholand (about a psychopath who goes from state to state in his private plane murdering a person in each city) made me think of him, wonder whether there was some injoke in operation here.

And the other novel it made me think of, just to complete a parallel literary couple, is Donna Tartt's Secret History (Has Donna slept with Brett? Now there is a piece of literary gossip I am keen to find more on). There is the same sense of a middle class descent into the dark side, into madness. There is the same concern for art, life, meaning.

The title bears more thinking about. It is explained by Violet at the end where she asks what it is that she loved. Was it Mark or the idea of Mark? I feel like I haven't understood Siri properly here. But the title sounds elegaic, sounds like the book feels, this beautiful remembrance of things past.

Once I got into this book - which did take ninety pages, but that had more to do with me than it - I found it compulsive, un-putt-downable. I cared and wondered about the fate of the characters - even the minor ones.

It should be made into a film, and by a great director. I think Sofia Coppola.

22 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, June 7, 2003

By	Shelah Horvitz (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Siri Hustvedt gets better with every book. She spent six years on What I Loved and it was time well spent. This is a book of great nuance and complexity, balanced beautifully, plotted beautifully, with characters that are both well-developed and open-ended. One of Hustvedt's interests is ambiguity. She studies how reality is a slippery thing, how you think you know about something or someone but you don't; you've only projected, and things are always more complicated than you expected. In a Hustvedt book, life is not predictable, and you are always surprised.

This alone would make her books interesting, but she also has the plotting skill of a mystery writer, so these literary, theoretical creations, illustrations of a point (or several points), are actually page-turners. Hustvedt is a blast to read. She is so much fun. On top of it all, her point of view is so gentle, so compassionate but quietly forceful, that spending an hour with one of her books, especially What I Loved, is like spending an hour with a very wise friend. It's a real treat.

I happen to enjoy her take on the art world, because no writer understands the art world like Hustvedt, and I happen to be a painter. She understands how artists think, how artists create, and she understands the mechanics and politics of the art world, especially the New York art scene, as though she were a visual artist in the thick of it. Now Hustvedt is an art historian/critic; you'll see her excellent articles in the British magazine, Modern Painters. But not all art historians understand art or how art is made from an artist's point of view and usually they get it a little wrong. Hustvedt is the only fiction writer I have ever read who really gets it about art, who hits the nail on the head. And she understands the politics and perversities of the art world, but never loses sight of the purity of making art, never gets cynical. If you're an artist, you have to read her. She stimulates your ideas, makes you think, makes you question your assumptions, and she makes you want to make art and push what you'd been doing just a little farther.

I might have to wait another six years for the next Hustvedt to come out. All I can say is, I can't wait.

7 of 7 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 "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: What I Loved (Paperback)

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?