SSM 2011: "The Restorer" by Susan Daitch (reviewed by Tim Horvath)

Occasionally prose gets described as "painterly," and it's generally pretty clear what that means—characterized by visual detail remarkable for its precision and its richness, a layering of images that might call to mind the way painters gesso a canvas in preparation for an actual picture, and perhaps a textured quality to the writing that makes the reader feel as if s/he is looking at a painting rather than a page whose only brushstrokes are black and white characters. Of course if the subject matter of a literary work is art, a painterly style seems suitable, but Susan Daitch in "The Restorer," originally published in her collection Storytown (Dalkey Archive, 1996), chooses an unusual perspective, that of a person who cleans away the detritus from paintings and touches them up, peeling away in order to try to reveal the artist's genuine vision, all the while calling into question the very possibility of any such thing.

Of all the places the story could have started, Daitch makes what I think is the best choice, beginning inside the painting—ontologically, then, we are within the art-vision first. The story opens, "He held a pipe to the boy's mouth so he could try to smoke. Another child, a girl, stared straight at Anne." That the first three characters are inside the frame and Anne is outside is not readily apparent, and this blurring is precisely the point. Nothing could be more in keeping with the protagonist's  experience of the world than to mirror the way she goes back and forth between the paintings and her office. It is an intellectual job but also a sensual one, almost as if Anne longs to be either a painter or inside the paintings herself. One of her restorative fluids is her own spit, with which she cleans faces like a mother rubbing her child's cheeks (and what could be more intimate than that finger-kiss). Moments later, noticing a man offering a boy a cigar in the painting, she "put[s] her nose up to his" as if to either kiss him or intervene and procure the cigar for herself, it's unclear which.

As the story progresses, we see that Anne takes a sort of a postmodern approach to the historical paths of these paintings, as though the "Rembrandt seared by acid" and the "Guernica splattered with red paint during the Vietnam War" were arguably improved by their attackers, who become, in her eyes, veritable collaborators in the artistic endeavor. When she hears that the acid-tosser was making a political statement, "want[ing] to destroy an object representative of authority," she finds herself sympathetic to his aims. Indecision comes up again and again in this story, reoccurring in a seemingly-unrelated conversation about the sex of oysters that she has over dinner—apparently their sex cannot be determined until the shell is opened. In this story, rarely do we breach Anne's shell—she lives her life isolated in the "thick-walled cell" of her studio office, traveling around the world collecting "metro stubs and taxi receipts" in her work, but forging relationships only with the figures in paintings and painters.

She's not exactly a luddite, though; she keeps a television set "wedged between a Klee and a Pollock," and watches a show about "women who had multiple cosmetic surgeries," drawing an unmistakable connection between the idea of preserving a painting and preserving a human face and features. Daitch then goes on to describe how Anne made a television appearance herself once to talk about the attack on a Vermeer. Unsurprisingly, she is highly attuned to the makeup artists who will bring to her the sort of touching up that she does to artworks. When she gets on the air, she does fine until they bring in, via satellite, the vandal himself, compared to whom she feels timid, "somber and prosaic." In one sentence Daitch links Barbie, the Mona Lisa, and Sharon Stone, slathering low culture giddily on high culture and high onto low. As I read this I imagined Da Vinci's rendering of Barbie, or the Mona Lisa itself painted on a glowing old cathode-ray television set. 

 A side of Anne unmistakably wants to be less careful, less painstaking in her actions, less guarded. But the story doesn't just give us a still portrait of Anne, as the plot comes to hinge on a particular Courbet self-portrait where she discovers a figure lurking underneath. It is unclear whether the hidden painting is another self-portrait or someone else, but immediately she recognizes that these are "like Siamese twins with one heart or one liver, one had to be saved, but the other had to be destroyed." At the same time, a mysterious figure starts coming to her apartment and expressing an unusually keen interest in her work on the painting. He is never given a name and Anne begins to suspect that he doesn't even work for the museum in any sort of official capacity—instead, he seems a figure out of Kafka'sTrial whose motives might be more metaphysical than personal. This character, whoever he is, knows Anne in some ways better than she knows herself, knows that she wants to take action, that "You stare at a painting for a long time, and you begin to want to do things to it…[l]ooking is too ordinary."

Ultimately, “The Restorer” is about impossible choices and the demand to act in the face of this impossibility. One might say that those who inflict damage on the artworks they fear or despise are only expediting Ozymandias’s fate. The continual touching up of paintings may be on a grand, historic scale what plastic surgery is in a single lifetime, futile if understandable attempts to contain entropy, defy gravity, make-believe we can train Schrödinger's cats to act in concert, to purr in synchronicity. If Daitch succeeds in momentarily suspending the frame between the artwork and the life, then every choice—whether made in paint or spit or battery acid--is a brushstroke that precludes other choices, every creation a destruction. "Destruction" sounds dramatic, "restoration" subtle, and "restruction" not even a word, but maybe it should be. I've been thinking about this a lot of late in reading The Pale King, another work which troubles the art/life boundary. Under the specter of impossible circumstances, Michael Pietsch seems to have done a better job than I'd have expected of figuring out what to keep and what to exclude, which portraits to scrape away and which to bring to the forefront, yet it is a book that we can only read conscious of the portraits underneath, as-yet-unwritten, wholly-conceived (?) and/or partly-conceived. And in the end, it is that "and/or" that is perhaps most haunting.

Tim Horvath

Tim Horvath is the author of Circulation, published by sunnyoutside press, and stories in Conjunctions, Fiction, Everyday Genius, and forthcoming in The Normal School. His short story collection Understories will be published by Bellevue Literary Press in early 2012. He teaches creative writing at Chester College of New England and works as a psychiatric counselor.

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