When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth

Fernanda Eberstadt has the democratic eye of a satirist (everyone is fair game), but in The Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth, she's also mainly large-hearted toward her many characters, even as she mocks them for their illusions and fits of pique. The novel's title is also a paraphrase of its story. The son of Heaven is Isaac Hooker, a Harvard wunderkind from small-town New Hampshire who metamorphoses into a visionary painter, a William Blake of the Hell's Kitchen district of Manhattan. And the daughter of the Earth is Dolly Gebler, a soulful New York patron of the arts. One of the hard-working rich, she comes from Old Money and keeps to a punishing schedule of good works (committee meetings in the mornings, gallery openings at night), all in the service of her conviction that art can change the world. But at home she lives uneasily with her husband Alfred, their three children, and an assortment of maids in a shabbily grand apartment overlooking the Hudson. Dolly gets testy with Isaac and begins to drop in at his loft with picnics. (The first hamper contains enough food to last him a week: a side of smoked salmon, a loaf of black bread, a wheel of Brie.) And when Isaac needs a live model--"a buxom one," for the shepherdess in his paintings, the reader can't help but be struck by how well the stout but voluptuous Dolly fits the job description. But how can their love affair happen? They live in different worlds and come from almost different generations and they are bashful. Isaac is in the habit of walking to Central Park in order to draw oak and plane trees as they emerge "from the heavy grey shadow of dawn--like the way you see cows sometimes looming in a field in the morning dark--surprised, comfortable." He's teaching himself to draw, "moving from scratchy, crabbed, overworked, to loose and fluid as a skater's glide." When Dolly asks him if he's drawing from nature, he says he is, but that it's "nature, New York City-style. Rats posing as sheep and crack dealers as shepherdesses. I go to Central Park weekend mornings, up by the Ramble where it's wild." Dolly tells him that Central Park is where she goes, too--for her early morning walks, and she is soon making a detour up to the Ramble to find Isaac scribbling under a tree, so cold that even his pencil's got "chilblains." They go off to a cafe called The Nectar for pancakes and coffee. And so begins their doomed romance, more intriguing by far than the more hackneyed affair Alfred is conducting with a young painter who teaches art to women prisoners on Rikers Island. But then Dolly and Isaac are idealists, while Alfred is a realist who believes that a society must choose between freedom and equality, and that to subscribe to the French Revolution's ideal of "liberty, equality, fraternity" is as idiotic as saying that water should be, all at the same time, "hot, cold, lukewarm". The Geblers own a farm on Long Island (Goose Neck Farm), and Dolly instals Isaac in this rural

A captivating look at New York City and the characters that made it what it was during the art boom of the 1980's this book was enjoyable, insightful, and knowledgeable. It read very quickly, and when I was finished, I wanted to pick it up and read it all over again.

To enter another person's world, to see things as they see them, to allow for different reactions to similar circumstances is to connect with people in a powerful way. Such empathy, compassion, and insight are essential for succeeding with the Genuine Selling system and to living a fulfilling life of Genuine Success. Listening to the stories of people in circumstances different from your own is entertaining exercise that develops this important skill. This is one of three novels (When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth, Spidertown, and Ellen Foster) that I recommend to my clients for their unusually intimate and immersive experiences of worlds most business people never encounter. The practice these novels offer with escaping our own narrow versions of reality can help us to be more receptive to the various worlds of the people we manage and sell to every day. Ms. Eberstadt continues the story of an extraordinarily talented and tormented young man, be! gun in Isaac and His Devils (out-of-print), with his impact on the New York art scene in When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth. The book introduces us to a wide cast of realistically drawn characters who intereact in a believable and compelling manner while moving in moneyed and stylish circles open to very few. I am  pleased if a novel provides me with insight into one type of person. I am thrilled that When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth took me deeply into the heads of three people: Alfred, the man who married so much money he never learned what he might have made of himself; Dolly, the heiress who loved the art milieu more than she cared about art; and Isaac, the brilliant artist whose personality and creations forced  their compromises to the breaking point. Woven through the plot and evocation of place is intelligent writing about how art looks to its creators and appreciators. I had always thought of art in verbal terms, but ! Ms. Eberstadt uses words to evoke the visual and emotional ! experience of creating a painting or sculpture.  It is like nothing else I have read and gave me a whole new appreciation for the visual mediums, yet another new world for me.

Reading this novel is like walking through a gallery; Eberstadt introduces many characters and points of view, until I eventually found the aspects that really intrigued and ultimately satisfied me. While the story contains no real surprises, it still managed to surprise me in its rich and loving detail. She obviously knows and loves New York. I was held at arms length from most of her characters until Isaac and Dolly came into focus during the second half of the book, but the set-up was not an entirely frustrating ride. Her ability to balance satire with a love for her characters held up from start to finish, and that is the most impressive aspect from my experience of reading this novel

This is a very nicely written and entertaining novel about the New York art scene of the 1980s. I liked it a great deal, because it is an almost old-fashioned novel, with its broad range of characters, well-executed plot, and social satire. I'd compare it to Bonfire of the Vanities..