Art imitates life.

The Art Student's War
Brad Leithauser

People generally tend to hate their in-laws. Something about merging, and staking claims, and control, I think, is the issue. I wouldn't know, being blessed with the most darling mother-in-law a girl can imagine. But let me tell you, it's not all milk and pie. I feel left out, you see, when my girlfriends start bitching about theirs. I can't relate. It's such a lonely feeling!

But I think Brad Leithauser and I would have gotten along fine in this respect. He was wild for his own mother-in-law; so wild, you see, that he used her adolescence during WWII as the plot for his latest book: Bianca "Bea" Paradiso, native of Detroit, student of the Art Institute Midwest, is eighteen in 1943, when she is asked to come sketch portraits of wounded soldiers for the war effort. The things she sees, the things she learns about herself, will affect her forever.

My own mother told me, once, that usually, for every bad thing you can say about somebody, you can also say a good thing. So I think I'll try it with this review, as an attempt for greater positivity in my life, and because, despite its flaws, I really did like this book. So here goes nothing:

• Bad Thing: This book purports to be a book about World War II, but actually just as much of the story takes place after 1945 than before it.
  
• Good Thing: But the part that takes place during the war is so finely done, and you are so subtly innundated with period detail that you don't feel like Leithauser is hammering it into you. (I'm looking at YOU, Elizabeth Berg.) And really, if you consider this to be two separate books, you aren't disappointed. And after a while, you get so immersed in all the characters' postwar lives that the abrupt shift seems less jarring. And maybe it's more important for the "war" in the title to refer to Bea's struggles at home, and with burgeoning adulthood, rather than to the literal war raging around her.
  
• Bad Thing: Heavens, I want to get to know the people I'm reading about, and there's nothing I like less than when an author keeps his people at arm's length from you. But at times this book feels a little too intimate. It's like when a person you don't know very well reveals some sort of childhood horror to you. We are whisked along as Bea's mother descends into madness, and we are there as Bea loses her virginity and we are front and center for every little twinge, perverse thought, and even bowel movement that these characters have. (I counted the word 'diarreha' at least seven times in this book, which seems a lot).
  
• Good Thing: But Leithauser sometimes gets it so right. He becomes his characters. There is a scene in which Bianca reveals to her father that a rich boy, heir to a drugstore fortune, is interested in her. And her father shoots her a doubtful look, and Bea is hurt, deeply, by the fact that he doesn't believe her. I don't know why this resonated with me but it did. It's just the kind of small parental betrayal that would stick with a person their whole lives. And he really succeeds at writing an authentically realistic young woman--hard for a man to do, I think.
  
• Bad Thing: For a book called "The Art Student's" anything, Bea sure seems to do--well, a lot of other things besides art.
  
• Good Thing: But the art parts are really interesting and authentic. And it's kind of a hoot to hear characters refer to Picasso and Dali as young upstarts, newcomers.
  
• Bad Thing: Some relationships feel unearned. Some characters are too good, and we don't know why. Other relationships are cobbled together for the sake of a story. The formation of these relationships is not revealed and they should be. Bea's mother worries that her father is in love with her sister, and that he doesn't love her, and it would have been nice to see some evidence that she's wrong, rather than having to take the author's word for it.
• Good Thing: some other relationships--especially those casual, day-to-day relationships that you form in an instant, with a perfect stranger--are pitch-perfect. Bianca's entire adult life is shaped by a brief encounter with a wounded soldier on a streetcar. There's a heartbreaking scene in which she interacts with a poor black classmate and in one line of dialogue--is that you, Tatiana?--uttered as he answer's the phone, reveals his entire persona to Bea and to us.
  
• Bad Thing: this book has a happy ending, and to some extent, it feels expected.
  
• Good Thing: But is it really happy? People have lost things, they've given up on things, and they're not all happy. Maybe Leithauser is trying to teach us something about perspective: the way that, with the right attitude, any ending can be a happily ever after.
  

All in all, I very much liked this book in places, and I very much disliked it in others. Leithauser is either a literary genius or a hack, and I'm apparently not intelligent enough to tell for sure which one he is. All I know is that it took me a while to get into the flow of his writing. Something was off: the dialogue, the pacing, the way facts and information were revealed. In parts, I loved this book and was uplifted by it; in other places, I was repulsed. I was never quite sure if I was reading light historical fluff or a gritty, realist prose. What was the point of it? Why is Leithauser writing it? Are we supposed to revel in the story, a fresh take on a familiar era? Is he just honoring his mother-in-law's situation? Or is he expounding on a greater theme?

I'm not sure. But I know I'll be thinking about it for days to come.

Rating: 3.5 of 5 stars.