Venus Rising

Film & BooksIssue: Leo 08

The Great Man

This book won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction for good reason. I started the “The Great Man” on Saturday morning and had to finish it by lunch the next day. When it started to rain I traded my lawn chair for the couch and kept on reading. This novel is fabulously funny, mischievous, and easy to read.

The Great Man, By Kate Christensen

305 pages. Doubleday. $29.95 

Set in New York City, “The Great Man” has the flare and zest of "Sex in the City." In a lesser novel this narrative would have read like a sitcom in a predictable and mechanical fashion, but Christensen is this year’s best. Her characters, particularly the women, are eccentric, defiant, and ‘delicious.’ And, her narrative purpose is tight, so tight that I didn’t realize the depths of her themes until I was done.

Now that Oscar Feldman, the fictitious painter is a dead, Teddy St. Cloud, the mistress and mother of Oscar’s twin daughters, makes it known to one of Oscar’s biographers, Henry Burke, that no man should ever use the word ‘delicious.’ Her direct approach comes as a further shock to Henry when Teddy explains that Oscar “was a very good painter with a shtick and a way with women.” Henry, a sexually frustrated married white man, is startled that the woman who Oscar kept hidden would dare to debunk such a great artist. Henry’s nemesis, Ralph Washington, is an unmarried black man whose writing is more cerebral than his rival’s. Just as Oscar lived two different lives, one with Teddy and the other with his wife, Abigail, Ralph and Henry will approach their biographies with a similar contrast. The distinctions are blatantly black and white; they represent each end of the spectrum, as do the mothers of Oscar’s children.

Abigail Feldman, the mother of his Oscar’s son is everything that Teddy could never be. She is wealthy, indulgent, and dignified. Her wealth, the life that she ultimately provided Oscar, made it possible for him to sneer at the Abstract Expressionists. Maxine Feldman, Oscar’s sister is also an artist equally as talented as her brother but lesser known. Her character is the most compelling, and her art-related secret will draw all of Oscar’s women closer to her because of it. 

When interviewed by the Washington Post, Christensen explained, “In literature, older women are not often given center stage. It’s the Oscars that get center stage.” Luckily, the real emphasis in “The Great Man” has little to do with Oscar Feldman and everything to do with ways in which the two women flourish without him.