Review: 'Sirens and Muses,' by Antonia Angress

If you've ever thought about becoming an artist (God help you), here's a good place to begin. In "Sirens & Muses," her first novel, Minneapolis writer and University of Minnesota MFA graduate Antonia Angress covers everything from stretching and gessoing a canvas to navigating the stomach-turning churn of MFA programs, exhibitions, galleries, publicity (good, bad and nonexistent), success, spectacular failure, competition, commerce, ethics — and, yes, aesthetics, because, in the midst of all the jockeying and lobbying and calculation, her characters can't help but wonder about the artistic worth and human cost of what they're doing.

We start at Wrynn College of Art in New York in 2011, with an ensemble of likely suspects: Louisa, a poor-ish painter from Louisiana, who's given grief for her heartfelt Southern Gothic aesthetic; Karina, rich and wildly gifted daughter of famous collectors, just off a missed semester because of a "dissociative episode"; Preston, an attractive if obnoxious provocateur who traffics in memes; and Robert, a middle-aged onetime phenom still trading on a conscience-plaguing painting of a friend dying of AIDS.

How these artists of varying degrees of talent, skill and savvy make use of one another — as subjects, lovers, supporters and competitors — at Wrynn and, shortly, in New York City once they for a variety of reasons are forced to leave the school, is interesting in itself; but mostly it, the plot, is a tidy structure upon which hang the far more interesting questions about love and art, fear, ambition and desire.

Angress is very good at getting what people think about and what they want when they make art, whether from political conviction, a performative impulse or a deep need to convey what they see. What it means to see is a frequent refrain, as Louisa, for instance, comes to understand her mother's advice, to "draw what you see. It didn't mean to depict things exactly as they were, but rather as you felt them, as they moved through you."

Or as Robert remembers stringing along the friend who'd died, "because he loved how Vince made him feel — it was the feeling of being chosen, of being seen." Or how Karina makes herself known to Louisa: "It was the feeling of being watched, of being seen." Or how Louisa sees herself in "The Picture of Dorian Gray": "It is not [the sitter] who is revealed by the painter; rather it is the painter who, on the colored canvas, reveals himself."

If this might seem somewhat programmatic, the moments of recognition and frustration, revelation and betrayal, desire and revulsion are convincing and moving, and Angress' portrayal of the intersection — or disconnect — of art, politics, idealism and practicality within the web of familial, romantic,and professional relationships is painterly, in the best sense of the word.

Ellen Akins is a Wisconsin-based writer and teacher of writing. EllenAkins.com

Sirens & Muses

By: Antonia Angress.

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 354 pages, $28.

Event: Book launch, in conversation with Julie Schumacher, 7 p.m. July 12, Magers and Quinn, Mpls. Register at https://bit.ly/3y32vrd