What I Loved

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?

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

This is one of the best books I've read 2003! I was already a big fan of Siri Hustvedt, but "What I loved" is by far her best book. I started reading a Saturday (luckily) and just couldn't put it down. A fantastic story, fantastic characters, beautiful language, so interesting topics (art and literature), it was all just.. I wanted to move in with them, share their lives (at least in part one)! If you want to read something that will stay in your mind for a long time, pick this one. It's just amazing!

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.

This is a superb book which is continuing to resonate for me, hauntingly, several weeks after reading it. Whilst measured and calm, the writing is extraordinarily skillful, passionate and affecting. One critical moment had me in tears while riding the tram to work.The plot is more-than sufficiently described in the editorial reviews here and does not, I think, need recounting. What I want to stress is the simply beautiful way in which Hustvedt explores and illuminates relationships. Between adults, friends, lovers, husbands and wives. Between children. Between parent and child...between parent and a memory of a child. No novel I have read recently comes closer to echoing my own experiences of life, love ... the whole damn thing.For me, now, "What I Loved" is the best book I have read in years. I had not heard of Hustvedt until this novel was published and I am now eagerly looking forward to reading her earlier work.