Fiction: In a New York gallery, an art historian is drawn to a painting of a female nude.
It is entitled Self-Portrait, but it is by a man; intrigued, he buys it and tracks down the artist. Thus begins the 25-year friendship which is lovingly retraced in Siri Hustvedt's third novel. Art historian Leo marries critic Erica; they have a child, Matt. Painter Bill marries poet Lucille; they, too, have a child, Mark. The two families live in parallel lofts in increasingly fashionable SoHo, they make names for themselves on the New York art scene, the kids are best pals. Cosy - so cosy, in fact, that even the break-up of Bill's marriage, and cold-fish Lucille's replacement by sensual Violet, barely ripples the surface of their immaculate lives.
Such is Part One of What I Loved. Part Two is enclosed in the shadow of death, from the freak accident which despatches 11-year-old Matt to the heart attack which snatches now-famous Bill. Part Three is a chronicle of deception and despair in which, as the book moves deeper into questions of sociopathology and moral corruption, Leo's narrative takes on the page-turning urgency of a thriller. There is enough material here for three novels, including a clutch of substantial sub-themes - eroticism, sensationalism, fanaticism of one kind or another - and What I Loved ought, by all the laws of literary physics, to fall apart.
But Hustvedt - poet, essayist, and wife to novelist Paul Auster - is too clever for that. If the comments on the dust jacket are anything to go by she appears to be making a name for herself in the place where arty meets scary - the scariest thing of all, perhaps, being the insularity and blindness of the supposedly clued-in New York art world she portrays.
For all their sensitivity and self-awareness, these are folks for whom nothing exists outside their endlessly circling orbit; life, as 11-year-old Matt puts it, is a picture in which we can see everything except ourselves.
A cool, intriguing book - dreadful title, though.
Arminta Wallace is a feature writer for The Irish Times
Arminta Wallace