A.S. Byatt’s “The Matisse Stories”

A.S. Byatt published The Matisse Stories in 1993. Reading the work in 2012, I find it’s aged well.

It’s a small volume, only three stories, two shorter stories bookending a longer one. All three are about color, and Matisse paintings, and how this time we live in is one if displacement, where living by the rules doesn’t apply because we only think they are rules, and when we learn that we find we don’t quite fit, that something is missing or incomplete.

In “Medusa’s Ankles,” an aging college professor becomes a regular customer at a hair salon because her hair is aging along with the rest of her. A painting, or print, by Matisse (largely pink) occupies a gray wall, and that is what first pulls her into the salon. All goes well until the salon is remodeled, the Matisse put away and replaced by photographs, and the owner makes an offhand comment about his wife’s ankles.

In “Art Work,” a magazine illustrator, her painter husband, and their two children depend upon their housekeeper to hold their lives together. Only the illustrator understands the importance of Mrs. Brown; her husband seems determined to drive her away. What the family doesn’t know is how well Mrs. Brown comes to understand concepts of color, and what she does with their cast-off clothes. They are in for a surprise.

In “the Chinese Lobster,” a college professor (also aging – I sense a theme here) has lunch at a Chinese restaurant with a friend and colleague, to let him know that a graduate student is accusing him of sexual harassment. The reader only sees the student through their conversation and the recall of a longish letter she’s sent. The student turns out to be anorexic, likely mentally ill, and is working on an art project that she believes will destroy Matisse (and why she wants to destroy Matisse is at the crux of the story).

Byatt, who’s received the Booker Prize and other significant recognitions, has created three stories in which at first little seems to happen; the plot structures lie within the minds of the characters. But by the end of each, the reader comes to understand that many things have happened, important things that transform the characters’ lives.

Every action, every word, plays a part in moving the story forward. The stories seem almost effortless, like a Matisse painting, but the appearance is deceiving. Each story is like a fine work of art, the complexity hidden behind the simplicity of the storytelling.

Byatt does not leave the reader hopeless, but neither does she leave a sense of hope or even relief. The Matisse Stories captures a sense of the displacement of contemporary life, seen through a lens of art and color.

Pilgrimage To Chicago

Last week, my wife and I did our third annual Long Mother’s Day Weekend Pilgrimage to Chicago. We go with one primary purpose – a singing duo named Chad and Jeremy. She first met them when she was 12, which was at least, uh, well, a fairly long time ago. For the last three years, they’ve performed two or three times in Chicago during the Mother’s Day weekend. This year, the Friday night concert was at Fitzgerald’s in Berwyn, and the Saturday night concert was at SPACE in Evanston. We stayed downtown, just off Michigan Avenue.

We love Chicago. We got to eat at Emilio’s Tapas in Streeterville, a short two blocks from our hotel (I had small plates – salad, grilled calamari and a black bean soup that was spectacular; my wife had grilled salmon). And a bottle of LAN, a Spanish wine that’s sort of like merlot but isn’t. Sitting at Fitzgerald’s Friday night before the concert, we were catered by Wishbone Restaurant, adjacent to and part of Fitzgerald’s. Wishbone specializes in something called “Southern Reconstruction Cooking,” and I don’t know if the reconstruction refers to how they’ve redone southern food or the period after the Civil War. Either way, I had the crawfish etouffe, which was good but I had to scarf it down in record time because the concert was due to start and we were sitting right in front.

We did shopping on Michigan Avenue (Johnston & Murphy and Nordstrom’s, you’re welcome). And we walked, oh, man did we walk. Fifteen blocks to Navy Pier, then at least that or more to the Art Institute, and then about 10 blocks home. And we walked around the huge exhibit of Matisse at the Art Institute – I had to sit and rest four times. The exhibit is worth its own blog post; it was about how Henri Matisse reinvented his art from 1913 to 1917. On Saturday, undeterred by rain and wind, we went to the Celtic Festival in Millennium Park.

Chad and Jeremy were great. The music leans to the ballad form, but these guys are professional entertainers – telling stories about the 1960s, being on television shows like Dick Van Dyke and Batman, singing beautiful love songs and occasional funny ones, like a riff on an Eagles’ song entitled “Avocado.” Chad and Jeremy are still making great harmony – and they first sang together in 1960. The two concerts in Chicago were hosted by Lilfest, which brings a lot of cool music to the city.

And yes, we drove, to, from and in Chicago. We even drove in rush hour traffic (aka motorized insanity) in 5 o’clock rush hour traffic on Friday, to get to Fitzgerald’s in Berwyn.

The most sobering sight was the Chicago Tribune newspaper on Sunday. Chicago is truly one of the great cities of the world – with an Illinois state legislature refusing to make the hard choices to avoid bankruptcy, the head of the Cook County suburban school district in a plea bargain over alleged theft charges, and the head of the transit authority killing himself by jumping in front of one of his Metra trains; he was being investigated for financial irregularities. Chicago is a neat city, but its politics make my home state of Louisiana look like a paragon of governmental virtue.

In spite of the political muck, we still love Chicago.

Painting: Bathers by a River by Henri Matisse, 1909-1916; Charles H. and Mary F.S. Worcester Collection, Art Institute of Chicago.

Related post: A Love Affair with Chad and Jeremy.