A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life
By Andrew Krivak
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 324 pp., $25
It is impossible not to like Andrew Krivak. He is honest and earnest, even-tempered and open-hearted. In measured tone and voice, he chronicles his eight years of restless searching. After growing up in a large Catholic family in Pennsylvania mining country, he left to build boats on Cape Cod, study philosophy and classics at St. John's College, and write poetry at Columbia University. But the religious life called to him. Taking vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, he entered the Society of Jesus as a novice.
Krivak's Jesuit training took him to Le Moyne College, in Syracuse, N.Y.; the Dominican Republic; Buffalo; Moscow; the Bronx; and Boston, always learning, teaching, helping, doing good. He was on a long retreat - not away from life but into himself. With a touching purity of heart, he considers his choices when he falls in love with a like-minded young woman. He recognizes that he "never believed that anyone could love me without one day walking away" and that the "priesthood seemed like the best guarantee" of belonging to someone. With this woman's love, he gives up the priesthood and embarks on marriage and fatherhood. One can only wish him well.
The Painter From Shanghai
By Jennifer Cody Epstein
Norton, 416 pp., $24.95
In the 1920s and '30s, Pan Yuliang was China's most famous and perhaps only Western-style woman painter, a label she objected to. In her early life, she objected to very little, being sold as a prostitute, then as a concubine to a government official. But as she grew as a woman and an artist, she asserted her vision and herself with greater authority.
The first part of this novel, an imaginatively reconstructed life, carries an erotic charge as it lingers over descriptions of innocent beauty despoiled. As a 14-year-old, Yuliang is introduced to the ways of men and the wiles of women in the brothel called the Hall of Eternal Splendor. When a powerful man buys Yuliang her freedom and installs her as his second wife, she hardly expects him to encourage her talent. But he generously sends her to the Academy of Art in Shanghai, where she wins a place at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. From Paris, she goes to Rome, then returns, a mature and scandalously famous artist, to Shanghai. There amid the political turmoil of 1936, Yuliang's exhibition, featuring controversial nude portraits, is reduced to shreds of canvas and shattered glass.
The erotic beginning of the novel belies the seriousness of its later chapters, which describe the natural gifts, personal resolve, and good fortune necessary for a woman to become an artist and to earn respect for herself and her art.
The Book of Dahlia
By Elisa Albert
Free Press, 276 pp., $23
The question that 29-year-old Dahlia Finger obsesses over in this unpleasant first novel is "Was she depressed because she was dying or was she dying because she was depressed?" She is dying, of a brain tumor. And she is depressed. Also self-absorbed, lazy, spoiled, shallow, and bratty.
In this long wail of a narrative, Dahlia heaps scorn on her self-centered mother, her sweet and ineffectual father, her despicable brother. When not trashing her family, Dahlia berates herself (aptly) for not having a job, friends, or interests. She uses her father's plastic to buy concert tickets, lattes, cocktails, slip dresses, music, and drugs.
When she receives her diagnosis, she goes with her loathed parents to the bookstore, where she chooses "It's Up to You: The Cancer To-Do List." With chapter titles borrowed from this list, Dahlia structures her tale as scathing criticism not only of such guides but also of the whole happy, healing self-help industry, beginning with "Something Wrong" and ending with "Be Well." In this final chapter, Dahlia's last thoughts are surprisingly, shockingly moving. "It occurred to her that lots and lots of people had died before this, though: like, everyone. . . . She wasn't ready."
Barbara Fisher is a freelance critic who lives in New York.
