A woman silhouetted against the lonely landscape of the north shore of Lake Superior; a child who, banished to play outdoors in the snow by a merciless father, builds an ice house and populates it with a ghost; a painter sketching his model in the dying light of a winter afternoon; Jane Urquhart is a poet, and it shows in this strange and lyrical novel in which a succession of vivid images drift slowly past until, in the end, they make up a cohesive whole. The story is narrated by Austin, the ruthlessly self-centred painter who observes other people with a detached and cruel eye, treating them as geometric surfaces rather than flesh-and-blood beings; as a study of man's inhumanity to man - and, needless to say, woman - The Underpainter lingers in the mind like a musky, dusty perfume.
