An intriguing, moodily tense portrait of an artist that’s both touching and disturbing
When Bobby Shaw’s father abandoned his family, he left Bobby and sister Maddy to be raised in Massachusetts by an embittered, controlling mother. Admiration for her daughter contrasts her denigration for a son she’s considered ugly from birth. She mocks his way of walking, the result of a combination of birth defect and car accident, and knocks him down every chance.
Bobby absorbs this maternal domineering, with the help of a close bond with his sister, and remains open to life’s possibilities when they appear. Such as on a visit with his family to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts when ten-year-old Bobby:
“. . . stumbled across the bronze cast of Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer by Edgar Degas . . . I fell in an immediate love, deep and unconditional . . . she was smiling at me, though she never smiled.”
Given his relationship with his mother, Bobby’s affinity for a sculpture he later discovers others find unattractive, seems inevitable. Art becomes his salvation and he’s good at it, earning (much to the surprise of his skeptical mother) admission to Stevens College. There, aided by an aggressively uninhibited art teacher, he evolves his eponymous talent: an ability to intimately explore women to immortalize them in sculpted form.
College is also where he meets his forbearing wife Claire who, along with his sister, contribute to the narrative in the unfolding of events as Bobby’s career and its accompanying fame soar. Their perspectives are integral to the plot and add an essential female element to Bobby’s.
Before the ladies chime in, the novel reads like a fictional memoir, with episodes from childhood related in a sober manner. Bobby exhibits a reverential warmth that softens his expressed frustrations with his mother, making one wonder how reliable a narrator Bobby is. For instance, in a scene as a youngster, listening in on his sister’s breakup with a longtime boyfriend:
“She hung up the phone having only uttered the word ‘hello’ then listening silently for a minute, maybe two, maybe more. Her gentleness in hanging up the receiver belied her devastation.”
The scene further reveals a caring nature that somewhat contradicts his more unsavory future conduct. An unreliable narrator might portray earlier years this way to achieve that effect. Then one has to consider the narratives from Claire and Maddy might not be reliable either. This is a dynamic that effectively reflects the ambiguities of real life, keeping the reader engaged.
A consistent strength of the novel is Bobby’s voice, often humorously self-deprecating and only at times (then only briefly) self-pitying. This extends to Claire and Maddy who are interesting on their own. Each woman has her own story, private issues, and while supportive of Bobby, neither is present merely to round out his story. The intertwining of the three points-of-view provides the dramatic irony for a well-earned climactic twist.
This works in concert with the non-chronological arrangement of the events or episodes. They cumulatively work like the inverse of sculpting—building up instead of cutting away—to arrive at a cohesive result. They provide foreshadowing, sometimes foretelling, to create a level of mystery and tension a conventional structure could not achieve.
The Gift could be considered a refined sculpture of words and sentences. A daring work not unlike the Degas sculpture was in his day. With a protagonist whose actions as an adult might require more than empathy for a challenging childhood to ward off censure. The psychological aspects at play would pique the interest of any analyst of human behavior.
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