The Great Man

(Doubleday. 320 pages)

by Kate Christensen

The great man at the center, and in the title, of Kate Christensen's latest novel never appears in a single scene.

He is Oscar Feldman, a New York painter who embodies all the cliches of the bad-boy artist: a hot-tempered rebel, envious of his rivals, lecherous, a monumental egotist with a wife and a mistress.

In his obituary, which opens the novel, we learn that Oscar turned his back on the drips and streaks of abstract expressionism in the 1950s and instead painted nothing but female nudes. Naked women were the singular obsession of his life and of his paintings.

This novel, then, is about Oscar's women. It tells the story of his wife, his lover and his sister as they sort through the details of his life and explain themselves to a pair of rival biographers, each of whom is writing a book about Oscar.

What works in this book is how mercilessly Christensen lays out the sacrifices each woman makes, the sort of trade-offs that men, especially great men like Oscar, never had to consider. "If you were a woman you could never have everything," says his lover Teddy.

Teddy enjoys a bohemian independence and she's clearly Christensen's favorite but being the mistress means a life of insecurity and loneliness. His wife, Abigail, has the status and security of the lawfully wed, but at the cost of a more adventurous life. His sister Maxine, an even better painter than Oscar, is fulfilled by her work, but isolated by its demands.

All these women, now nearing the end of their lives, remain frustrated in varying degrees, and Christensen admirably never backs off. There's no cheap redemption nor an uncomplicated happy ending.

Often, however, the admirable story is swamped by overripe prose. It should be a warning flag when, in the opening scene, two characters walk down a short hallway and are "disgorged" into the next room.

In the same scene, one of Oscar's biographers describes his wife's irrational love for their newborn son. "This morning she kissed him with the predatory zeal of a succubus," he says. It's a stilted bit of dialogue, made even worse by the next sentence: "Teddy smiled at him, appreciating the phrase."

There are too many of these odd and awkward interruptions. During one phone call, Abigail notices "that her telephone mouthpiece smelled weirdly of broccoli. Had she been eating too many cruciferous vegetables?" Indeed, what if she had?

This becomes an almost insurmountable problem when the characters talk about painting. After all, the nature of the artist should be at the center of this book, so it's grating to hear one biographer, Henry, praising "the powerful tension between control and wildness, your fluid and subtle but rigorous and tough-minded brushwork."

It's not an awful sentence, but it sounds more like an art history lecture, not like real dialogue. The other biographer, Ralph, speaks the same way: "Oscar transcends these cliches of debutante and chanteuse by imbuing each one with an independent character that seems to break away from the artist's brush and possess her own soul."

All this imbuing and tough-minded brushwork mars an otherwise compelling meditation on life and biography, women and paintings of women. It makes The Great Man, in the end, something less great than it could have been.