Authenticity. By Deirdre Madden. Faber and Faber, 385 pp. £10.99 sterlingThe cover of Authenticity reproduces a self-portrait by Nicholas Poussin. Deirdre Madden's absorbing and richly layered novel paints the portrait not just of one, but of three artists.
It tells the interconnected stories of Roderic Kennedy, Julia Fitzpatrick and William Armstrong and teases out the intersections between their different histories.
In so doing, it holds iconic notions of the artist up to scrutiny and explores the messy divergences between art and life and between romanticized views of bohemisnaism and the material and emotional sacrifices that an artistic career entails.
The entanglements of the triad of artists at the core of the novel allow Madden to produce a complex and constantly shifting account of painters' lives as they are lived and also as they are cast into shape by retrospection and philosophical speculation. Julia, a talented, young artist who steadfastly pursues her vocation, is fascinated by the two older men, Roderic and William. While the former becomes her lover, the latter, whom she meets as he is on the verge of suicidal despair, exerts a hold over her because he seems to her to embody some authentic but unrealised version of the artist.
Moreover, the two men appear to be doubles, twinned, troubling allegories of the devastating demands of art. Roderic is a successful artist who has destroyed himself and his marriage in his relentless devotion to his craft. William, by contrast, has denied his talent and succumbed to the lure of bourgeois security and wealth. Perfection of the life or of the art appear to be the opposing choices that faced these two men.
Madden's nuanced narrative, however, shows that such neat contraries are insufficient to describe the turmoil of her protagonists' lives. The failed artist desires to give expression to his creativity, while the successful artist yearns to heal the rift between himself and his former wife and daughters. Julia acts as a pendulum between both fates while seeking a path of her own. Completion is not possible for any of them but each remains true to the imperatives of the artistic calling. The finely balanced denouement uncovers the paradoxical truth that William, the artist who never was, possessed the integrity that is a necessary component of the creative life.
Just as Madden uses her multiple cast of artists to dislodge abstract views of this métier, so too she indicates that art is impossible without the active support of others. The riven but co-dependent relationships between her protagonists and their families crucially shape their careers. Those relatives who seem least to understand the artistic world, such as Roderic's brother or Julia's father, are shown to have personal visions that also have aesthetic merit.
Artistic ways of seeing ultimately spill over in Madden's novel into the ordinary and are in everyone's gift. Even though her characters are solitaries damaged by their sense of struggle and loss, they are also capable of sublime moments of insight that allow them to transcend the limitations of the destiny they are forced to follow. Intense moments of observation typify human relationships in Authenticity. Through the subtlety of her narration, Madden helps us see how others view themselves and their environment. Despite the tragedies that the life of the artist necessarily spawns, it is suggested in the delicate double ending to the novel that art can have a redemptive force, especially for her heroine, Julia.
Aficionados of Deirdre Madden's fiction will recognize in Authenticity many of the hallmarks of her previous work, including the crystalline exactitude of her style, the oblique rendering of social milieu and the broken nature of human communication. In keeping with the themes broached, there is a sense that Madden's own vision has matured and reached a new expansiveness in this novel. Authenticity is a skilfully etched, profound and luminous fiction which deftly explores the ramifying realities of the lives of its ensemble of characters. This deeply resonant and perfectly calibrated novel proves that Deirdre Madden is one of the most distinctive and accomplished voices in the contemporary Irish literary scene.
Anne Fogarty is a lecturer in the Department of English, UCD