The Village Idiot

Starred review from August 15, 2022
Stern (The Pinch) sketches an exuberant portrait of expressionist painter Chaim Soutine, anchored in the artist’s bohemian life in 1917 Paris. Chaim arrives destitute from a Russian shtetl and begins a friendship with painter Amedeo Modigliani. Reclusive and artistically driven, Chaim adores Amedeo and gets caught up in his bold adventures—brothel visits, a duel, and an elaborate boat race hoax where Amedeo is in a bathtub, ostensibly being pulled by three ducks (in reality, Chaim is at the bottom of the Seine pulling Amedeo while wearing a heavyweight diving suit). While underwater, Chaim ponders his past and, in a fantastical twist, anticipates the years to come: the poverty and beatings of his youth; the mystical “demidemons” that haunt his imagination; his discovery by art patron Dr. Albert Barnes, whose patronage brings recognition and financial security; his friendship with art historian Élie Faure; the stability brought by Mademoiselle Garde, whom he loved; the WWII years in German-occupied France as Chaim tries to outrun the Nazis; and his chronic stomach problems that will ultimately lead to his death from a perforated ulcer. Stern brings the slovenly, uncouth, and smelly Chaim to life as a modern art visionary, adding humor and heartache to the inspired artist’s painful and tragic life, and he shines in his use of Jewish folklore and characters. This luscious blend of fantasy and reality captivates.

Starred review from July 1, 2022
This poignant, richly colorful novel is based on the life of artist Chaim Soutine. Soutine (1893-1943) first appears in a diving suit, walking along the riverbed of the Seine in 1917. He's part of a scheme concocted by his friend Modigliani, who has organized a race of makeshift boats, including Modi's own bathtub, which Soutine is secretly towing to victory. Stern uses the episode as a quasi-mystical, somewhat forced device in which Soutine is able to "[walk] through the years at the bottom of the Seine," seeing both his past and future. His childhood in a Russian shtetl is marked by terrible beatings brought on by his compulsion to sketch human figures, contrary to orthodox Jewish law. Drawn, like so many artists of the time, to Paris, Soutine does day labor and paints, eventually gaining financial support from American collector Albert C. Barnes. He abandons a wife and child, loses another partner to the antisemitism of occupied France, and then navigates wartime years of struggle, hiding, and flight with Marie-Berthe Aurenche, ex-wife of Max Ernst. Soutine's is a nasty, brutish 50 years of life in which Stern focuses on the genius and drive of creativity, the strange force that is touched by and persists through years of trials and pain. He adds the historical context, the artists and musicians and patrons, as necessary and deftly, with writing that is by turns lush, almost magical, or starkly realistic. Known for his many novels on Jewish culture, Stern chooses here to depict Soutine as a man who fled his grim shtetl life, remained nonobservant for decades, but in Vichy Paris realizes, "I'm a Yid again. The tribe he thought he'd left so far behind has caught up with him once more"--something as inescapable as genius. An outstanding portrait by a writer at the top of his form.

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Starred review from September 1, 2022
In an act of resounding creative alchemy, audaciously imaginative Stern combines his fascination with Jewish folktales and mysticism with the life and work of painter Chaim Soutine, forging saturated, gleaming, and tumultuous prose that captures the vision and vehemence of Soutine's thickly textured, writhing, nearly hallucinatory paintings. As a starving artist new to Paris during WWI by way of a Lithuanian shtetl where he was severely beaten for his compulsion to draw and paint, Chaim is befriended by the exuberant if self-destructive Modigliani, who introduces him to his dealer and embroils him in wild adventures, including the stunt that frames the novel--Chaim's descent into the Seine in a diving suit to secretly pull Modigliani's winning entry in an artists' boat race. The past, present, and future well up in the mind of the submerged artist, a defiant, moody painter who outrages his neighbors by painting beef carcasses, lunges at the canvas and hurls brushes to the floor, and suffers from agonizing ulcers. As friends, art collectors, and lovers contend with Chaim's slovenliness, recalcitrance, obsession, and gloom, Stern tracks the morphing of Paris' art world over the decades, culminating in the German occupation. Stern's kinetically inventive and insightful homage is incandescent, riveting, and revelatory in its wrestling with the mysteries of creativity and the scourge of antisemitism.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.