Beauty: A Novel. - book reviews

Art in America, Feb, 1993 by Brooks Adams

Brian D'Amato's first novel can be seen as a postmodern update of the Pygmalion myth. It tells the tale of Jamie Angelo, a successful young painter in SoHo who practices illegal plastic surgery on the side. Collaborating with a couple of scientist friends, he has redesigned some of the most famous faces in show business. Angelo is a computer whiz as well. Using a composite-image program, he combines hundreds of pictures of the most beautiful women in history and art history to compose an Ur-visage which he surgically implants on his Indian girlfriend, the struggling performance artist Jaishree Manglani. When things start to go awry with the faces he has created, the plot of Beauty rapidly escalates into a parable of revenge, flight and surgical incognitos. The novel also contains a subplot in which the smuggling of Pre-Columbian antiquities out of the Yucatan is combined with a lurid fantasia of human sacrifice as practiced by the Mayans. All of this somehow dovetails neatly with the plastic surgery theme.

D'Amato's fiction is eclectic and intellectually bumptious in its tone. The book is laced with erudite meditations on the nature of beauty - the wiseacre narrator quotes everyone on the subject from Edmund Burke to Georges Bataille. Seemingly indebted to Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, with its feminist debunking of the fashion and cosmetics industries, D'Amato's novel is an effective skewering of the modeling, art and entertainment worlds. It also offers a fascinating picture of Yale in the 1980s, where the narrator, his medical cohorts and many of his female subjects went to school. As Angelo explains, "Many of my generation at Yale and whenever had the same problem: We all wanted to be really smart, but we were fascinated with Cher, with Madonna, with Elizabeth Taylor, and we never knew where our company side left off and our serious side began."

D'Amato's grasp of technical lingo from many fields is impressive. The 30-year-old author is something of a polymath: the son of mystery writer Barbara D'Amato, he has been a critic for Flash Art and worked for a year as a gallery at 65 Thompson (where much of Beauty was written). He is also a computer artist and a founding member of Softworlds, an art and technology collective; his work was included in "Through the Looking Glass," a group show about virtual reality that appeared last year at Jack Tilton [see A.i.A., Oct. '92].

Beauty itself seems to aspire to a state of virtual reality. It is a "faction"/roman a clef, in which references to real people, actual locales and brand-name clothes are mixed up with thinly disguised fictional characters and places. The narrator, a painter of abstract canvases, shows with a dealer named Karen Goode, obviously based on Mary Boone, in the Valley of Kunsthandlers (or SoHo). One bravura passage begins with an accurate description of the experience of entering the heavy glass doors at Karen Goode's, a gallery "very carefully set up to intimidate visitors as much as possible." D'Amato's "King of the Valley," Nino Fortreza, is a Leo Castelli-like character and his "Knave," Jerry Davidian, is described as "the Big Noise from L.A., the Resale Raider, the Lebanese Connection, the Turkish Mafia, the Prince of Darkness." Event as recent as the opening of the Richard Prince retrospective at the Whitney Museum in April 1992 are used as settings for the fictional proceedings. Angelo takes Jaishree, whose face he has turned into a living, sculptural creation, to a famous photographer named "Timothy," clearly based on Greenfield-Sanders (who, incidentally, took D'Amato's dust-jacket photo). "Timothy," we learn, "wasn't really interested in |getting through the mask'; he kind of liked people's masks."

D'Amato also exploits art world fact to pin down the science fiction aspects of his treatment of cosmetic surgery, a subject which takes on an almost mystical significance in the novel. There are long passages devoted to the artistic and surgical processes involved, both ancient and modern. These include a description of the narrator's making of a plaster cast of a subject's face and his "sculpting" on living victims with a mysterious substance (as yet unpatented) known as PCS 10, short for Plasti/Collagen Silver. (The latter entails some pretty gruesome descriptions of surgical procedures.) One of the best set pieces is a long paean to the pleasures of painting skin tones, in which special praise is given to the Netherlandish painter Mabuse. Looking for a contemporary analogy for PCS 10, the narrator observes:

You might seen collagen in a sculpture by Liz Larner, a young Neo-Minimalist sculptor from California, in the 1989 Whitney Biennial. It was a laboratory beaker filled with collagen that had been tinged with soluble fluorescent dye. . . . Maybe she was trying to say something about the amount of money people but into cosmetic surgery.

In this novel, artists as much as models and fashion designers are obsessed (and victimized) by the Beauty Myth. But although the feminist critique of cosmetic surgery is brought up and discussed by the narrator, it finally does not interfere with his megalomaniacal project. (Early on, Angelo says, "I'm a lookist. It's true. That's the Lesbian-Awareness word for what I am.") In Beauty, plastic surgery remains first and foremost something that men do to women. Only near the end of the novel is facial transformation imposed on a man, the narrator himself. When Angelo is forced to redo his own face to escape detection, it is perhaps not surprising that he picks another artworld model: "I'd based myself largely on Alex Pickman, that really good-looking young painter friend of mine whom we all used to envy because everyone thought he was so sexy, and partly on the young Basil Rathbone, with a hint of Raphael."