Feast Your Eyes and The Friend

In the past couple weeks, I’ve read two interestingly structured novels about art, friendship, family, memory, and more.

 Feast Your Eyes by Myla Goldberg is structured as an exhibit catalog written by the artist/photographer’s daughter Samantha Jane and also incorporating excerpts from her mother’s journal and interviews with people from her mother’s past. Lillian knew as a girl in Cleveland in the 1940s that she would move to New York and be a photographer, despite her parents' wish that she lead a  more traditional life. In 1951, after graduating from high school, she takes off to pursue her dream. By 1955, she has had her first show, given birth to her daughter (never telling the father that she was pregnant), and met Ken, with whom she will move to Brooklyn, free for a few years to pursue her photography without the constraints of making a living. But then Lillian becomes pregnant; she wants an abortion but Ken wants the baby, and the rift destroys their already-troubled relationship. Lillian has an abortion and a photograph of Sam and herself that she takes in the aftermath shocks viewers when it appears in an exhibition titled "The Samantha Series"; the ripples from this event permanently alter Sam and Lillian's relationship.

This brief synopsis does not do justice to the complexity of the plot; I have not even mentioned  Lillian's two significant friendships, the relationship that develops between Sam and her maternal grandparents, the court case revolving around the Samantha Series, and more. The story of these deeply realized characters--even the minor characters are three-dimensional--is moving. In addition, the descriptions of how Lillian worked and the resulting 100+ images included in a posthumous exhibition gave this non-artist a window into photography and the creative mind. 

I loved Goldberg's first novel, Bee Season, and Feast Your Eyes is similar in its originality, its complexity, its insights into art, and its spot-on portrayal of a young female character, and yet wholly different. Highly recommended.

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez is presented as a letter from the nameless narrator to her nameless friend, a well-known writer, her former teacher, and a recent suicide. Her friend was a womanizer who seduced and sometimes married his students. His third and final wife convinces the narrator to take in his dog, a Great Dane named Apollo. Since the narrator lives in a New York apartment, a Great Dane presents numerous challenges but also offers solace. Apollo's role in the novel provides the closest thing to a plot that the book has; most of the book is more a reflection on writing, memory, friendship, loss, and grief. I can't say I loved The Friend but it was interesting and thought-provoking, and well worth reading.

Favorite passages:

When we disagreed, Lillian's eyes stayed on my face, as if to remind me that our friendship would always have a place in the world.

Feast Your Eyes

If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told it does, it appears that writing takes some away.

The Friend, when the narrator hears another writer say about her friend, "Now he's officially a dead white male."