DISCIPLINE, by Larissa Pham
Fiction about other art forms is value-added, as they say in the corporate world. If it did nothing else (and it does plenty more), Larissa Pham’s first novel, “Discipline,” would sneak to its readers an idiosyncratic course on modern female American painters with whom they may only have glancing acquaintance.
Vija Celmins, for example, and her photorealistic ocean waves; Agnes Martin and her pastel stripes; and Helen Frankenthaler and her partially unprimed canvases. Chapters of “Discipline” are named for these women. “There is something,” remarks Pham’s narrator, Christine, contemplating a favorite Frankenthaler at a Chicago art museum, “about the audacity of leaving all that blank space.”
Like many heroines and heroes of first novels, Christine is somewhat adrift. (Bodies of water figure prominently here, starting with Lake Michigan, which makes the city feel “perched on the lip of nothingness, a settlement on the bank of infinity.”)
A lapsed art student, she herself has written a first novel, and embarked on a kind of self-made tour for it, tours being something publishers tend to bankroll only for famous authors. A planned stop in Taos has been canceled for lack of interest, and the organizers in Houston are being squirrelly.
Christine’s book is a twisted roman à clef, a revenge fantasy about her own former professor Richard. He’s a painter of middling renown who gave her a departmental award that a classmate might have deserved more, seduced then discarded her. Suddenly doubting her talent, she stopped painting and has taken up that other super-remunerative, easy profession: words.
Our protagonist’s protagonist trashes the fictional Richard’s studio, using, among other weapons, a palette scraper, then kills him in an unspecified violent manner. (“It feels unearned,” her editor complained of this plot twist.)
“Discipline” is thickly pigmented with the suspense of whether Christine, too, will polish off her former prof, who has sent her an ominous email about the novel — “That’s not how I remember it” — and may have popped up in the back of a reading in Los Angeles. But the lights dazzled her, like flashbulbs in a film noir, and she couldn’t tell for sure.
Pham is the author of “Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy,” an impressionistic memoir-in-essays whose topics included running; BDSM; an eating disorder; exes addressed in the second person, as if in a letter; her parents’ immigration from Vietnam; her study of art and her rape by an older artist. One might reasonably assume “Discipline” is another attempt to metabolize this crime.
It’s a better book than “Pop Song”: tauter, more mature and, well, disciplined. It invites us to consider how much of success is circumstance, practice and focus, rather than talent or destiny. And its depictions of anodyne modern romantic communication are shrewdly chosen: love poems stashed in zip files; emails printed with shame in lieu of handwritten letters; the way young people now have a strange “we’re talking” phase that precedes actual “dating.”
Christine relates to Josephine Hopper, Edward’s wife and primary model, who gave up her career to support his work, among other indignities. She craves love but can’t quite figure out what shape it should take, falling back into bed with a former boyfriend, an ex-alcoholic who now guards the “black box of his sobriety.”
She encounters other interesting people in her travels — a biologist researching “bilateral symmetry” (their suitcases get mixed up); the classmate who probably deserved the award, and who remains committed to her art; a queer studies professor whose girlfriend has become paranoid after an allergic reaction. But all roads are leading to a confrontation with Richard, who has mysteriously retreated to an island off Maine.
It’s a place she associates with “Marsden Hartley, fir trees and a particular opaque shade of orangey red, which I realized was the color of either cooked lobster or a safety buoy.” And when Christine — the very name! — gets there, the book acquires Stephen King vibes. Something spooky is going to go down by the foggy sea, and let’s not forget the ominously bobbing boats, one mysteriously christened Julie.
“Discipline” is spare, sometimes to the point of attenuation, with extra paragraph breaks and small, dramatic boldface interludes that are hard to parse. (The audacity of leaving all that blank space.) But Pham is a writer to keep a close eye on.
DISCIPLINE | By Larissa Pham | Random House | 224 pp. | $28
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
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