May review for the Eclectic Reader's Book Challenge 2013: The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan, 2013. [Published in 2013 category]
At its simplest, The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan is an inventive historical novel about a young girl who modeled for Edgar Degas. The text expands on the story of the young Marie van Goethem, beginning in 1878 Paris shortly after her father has died suddenly, leaving them under the wobbly care of their absinthe-soaked washerwoman mother. Marie and her two sisters, Charlotte (younger) and Antoinette (older), have to find their way through the poverty-riddled slums on their own, using only their smarts and their dancing shoes to climb their way up. However, beneath the surface it is much more than that. Set in the Belle Époque of Paris during the years of Edgar Degas’s rise to fame and Emile Zola's stage blowout, The Painted Girls follows the real-life model for Degas's wax-and-fabric sculpture Little Dancer Aged Fourteen as she and her sisters create a tenuous touchstone to the rest of the era. It clear-headedly examines the little-known seedy side of Paris that exists behind the shining tutus of the petit rats of the Paris Opéra and the life a young girl must lead to try to pull herself out of it.
Using three historical events from the 1880s as the framework for her novel, Buchanan takes these events and embellishes her two protagonists lives to create spider-thin connections between them, yet somehow they feel organic, though they are "little more than imagination and ink" (Author's Note, 353). Each historical prong has been thoroughly researched and documented in the novel, providing actual newspaper clippings in addition to some of her own imagination, and each element seems designated to a particular sister or their relationship to one another. Historical fiction such as this has always intrigued me, watching an author ask herself questions to delve into a part of a historical world, wondering what questions those characters asked themselves to move through their lives. Degas and his paintings are the realm of middle child Marie, trying to succeed in the Opéra where her elder sister failed, perhaps taking the path that Antoinette would not, with her sharp tongue and lack of filter. L'Assommoir by Emile Zola is Antoinette's domain; It is where she discovers a different sort of performance life, as well as the darker parts of the world. It is where she meets the man who is to bring her into womanhood and farther away from her little sisters. And finally, the famous criminal trial of Émile Abadie and Michael Knobloch. By making Abadie the lover of Antoinette, this trial deepens the rift between Antoinette and Marie, each trying to keep the family afload, yet not understanding how the other means to do so. The connection comes full circle with Edgar Degas's studies of the two criminals at their trial, as seen below.
Degas's Criminal Physiognomies, from the trial of Émile Abadie and Michael Knobloch, ca. 1880-81.
One of my favorite things about this particular book was the existence of real-life objects that correlated to Buchanan's striking prose. (A shortcut to all the paintings mentioned in the book accompanied by their quotes can be found on the author's site here). I have long been in love with the brushstrokes of Edgar Degas, and my small, square book of Degas paintings helped me enjoy this novel so much more. Having such a tangible connection to the past allowed Buchanan the ability to focus not so much on the paintings themselves--because they existed, and readers could check them out in reference for themselves--but more on what the paintings meant in this insular little world she was creating, allowing her to go deeper into the characters and their motivations, all the while leading us by the hand beneath the strokes.
Another seemingly small point of reference is Buchanan's seamless inclusion of untranslated ballet terms. She threw around petit rat and ronds de jambe as if they were nothing, and although it would've been nice to have a glossary on hand for the uncultured observer, at the same time it almost added to the completeness of the Paris world by its omission. These girls know the words that will get them out of the slums and into the Opéra, they know the body positions that they translate to, and the words are simply part of the atmosphere.
The famed statue, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen.
Part of the beauty of Buchanan's newest novel is that it isn't about the pretty people, the lifestyles of Paris, so to speak. It is about the hardened ones. The girls who try and try and fall down again and again, to the point where sometimes it seems, like Marie says in her interpretation of Zola's play, "it is about being born downtrodden and staying that way. Hard work makes no difference" (98). As Marie's story goes on, she begins to identify more and more with that sentiment, against her will, as she tries to make the right decisions but keeps getting stuck with the wrong ones. Buchanan allows us inside Marie's head for shorter stretches of time as the novel reaches its climax, the shorter structure seemingly mimicking the young girl's downward spiral. "A life, unfolding the only way it can," it is said of L'Assomoir throughout the text, and the reader wants to fight for Marie as much as she can to make sure Marie gets what she wants in the end (99).
Published in early 2013, The Painted Girls marks only the second novel under author Buchanan's belt, and already she is quickly becoming regarded as a new force to be reckoned with.
