Leaving Van Gogh: A Novel Review

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(More customer reviews)Remember the scene in director Jodie Foster's film "Little Man Tate" when Fred, the boy genius, is asked by his mentor why he thought painter Vincent Van Gogh depicted a solitary white iris amidst an entire field of the purple variety? Fred's simple yet profound response, "Because he was lonely," seems to provide answers to many questions about the passionate artist, all of which are touched upon with sensitivity and sympathy by author Carol Wallace in her novel "Leaving Van Gogh."
Narrated by the doctor immortalized by Van Gogh's painting, the "Portrait of Dr. Gachet," the novel gracefully explores themes of love, friendship, genius, melancholy, mental illness and a physician's obligation to his patient. Because of his experience in treating mental illness at the Bicêtre and Salpêtrière hospitals in Paris, Paul Gachet is asked by Theo Van Gogh to treat his brother Vincent in the doctor's home town of Auvers-sur-Oise, a community in a northwest suburb of France's capital city. As an amateur painter with much interaction as a professional consultant with other notable artists of the time period (Pissarro, Renoir, Manet, and Cezanne), Dr. Gachet interacts with Vincent on a level to which they both can relate, all the while observing the compliant patient for clues that will unlock the secret of his acute melancholy and mood swings. As the relationship between the doctor and the artist develops into a friendship, Gachet attempts to understand Vincent's passionate genius in order to enable the painter to continue endowing his work with the great beauty and full spectrum of human experience encapsulated within each precisely rendered brush stroke. As a well-developed literary protagonist, the lofty doctor is forced to diagnose himself, looking at events in his own life that lead him to view love, loyalty and the Auvers-sur-Oise microcosm in a completely different way that will allow him to accept Vincent's eventual suicide from a profoundly diverse vantage point.
Wallace's prose seems almost conspiratorial; she puts the reader into the mindset of the good doctor as he attempts to puzzle out Vincent's desires while examining and defending his own. At the same time, she lets her audience see Vincent as the manic artist who can do nothing but paint--who will most definitively die if he cannot create and whose power to do so is inspired and fueled by sheer force of will to instill emotions within each piece he captures. The reader can see and feel his loneliness and on some artistic level understand how what he is and what he is compelled to do sets him apart. In a similar respect, the doctor's desire to understand and "help" as more than just a voyeur becomes poignant; his success elusive and thereby sadly unrealized. Gachet's history contains some dark moments that Wallace uses to round out her literary journey for him, allowing him, if not total comprehension, at least some comfort that his involvement with Vincent, does bring about a necessary peace for them both.
Bottom line? His bright sunflower yellows, cobalt blues and swirling gobs of paint trademark Vincent Van Gogh as the unique artist he is: a seer who views the world through a prism of color and texture that screams of beauty and sensitivity. Carol Wallace's novel, "Leaving Van Gogh" allows the reader to explore the world's fascination with the great artist through the memoir of Dr. Paul Gachet from a psychological and immensely human perspective. It enables us to understand Vincent's one white iris solely rendered amidst the field of purple as symbolic of the artist's acute aloneness punctuated by the sole need to create and capture on canvas emotional release. Prone to violence and disturbing mood swings, and dually anesthetized and fueled by absinthe, Vincent, living in a world of modern medicine, would, perhaps, be diagnosed with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, porphyria, advanced staged syphilis or absinthe poisoning. Whatever the imbalance, Wallace explores Vincent's short stay in Auvers-sur-Oise with great compassion and respect for his amazing genius while breathing life into his relationships with the doctor, his brother, his brother's wife and his art. Recommended as is Irving Stone's Lust for Life, Lust for Life, and Vincent & Theo.
Diana Faillace Von Behren
"reneofc"


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