Beauty: A Novel. - book reviews

Art in America, Feb, 1993 by Brooks Adams

D'Amato's narrator alludes frequently to art-historical antecedents for himself and his cosmetic surgery. At times his surgery/esthetic seems predictably surrealist in its inspiration, an offshoot of L'Amour fou. (Indeed, the novel's dust jacket image is a detail of Man Ray's La Resille, showing a woman's face shot through a hairnet.) The narrator's web of references also embraces Symbolist art: among the possessions he has piled up in secret safe-deposit boxes and warehouses is a painting by Jean Delville, and that Belgian visionary's ideal of androgynous beauty seems to inform the narrator's zombielike creation. The element of fin-de-siecle morbidity in his work is established through allusions to Walter Pater. And, finally, the quintessential modern sphinx is invoked in the following scene at the office of a lawyer representing one of the narrator's victims:

There was one painting on the wall, behind his desk, and when I turned toward him, all I could do was stare at it. It was a huge gold Warhol Marilyn, a single one. A good one, a million-dollar painting. She had such menace in her eyes, and such menacing teeth. I remembered what Robert Pincus-Witten had said about the Marilyn paintings, that they were variations on Leonardo's Medusa, and Marilyn was the monster that turned men to stone. But not by ugliness, but beauty.

Paradoxically, we are never given a very clear idea of what Jamie Angelo's own paintings look like. At one point they are called abstract, and elsewhere we hear about his "combination Cibachrome/painting technique." The most loving descriptions are reserved for his signature cadre - "a wide, round-cornered rectangular frame in gold or silver leaf with dark striations running around through it, a bit like the grooves in a Whistler frame. It relates the paintings to television - which suggests narrativity - and to late modernist architecture."

Perhaps Angelo's paintings are part of the current vogue of body-referenced abstraction. When several of his works are included in a group show at the New Museum, one painting - "the only one that used the materials I use in my surgical line" - is described by the narrator: "It was a diptych, two panels each about two feet tall. . . . The one on the left had Artificial Skin stretched inside it, and it had foam underneath the skin so the surface bulged up slightly. . . . The companion panel was . . . a scabby-looking, irregular, jagged field of clotted, wrinkled crud, in mottled colors."

Yet the exact nature of Angelo's art remains vague, perhaps because the artist is so preoccupied by his sideline. Furthermore, Angelo is always threatening to give it all up in order to start painting landscapes in Nova Scotia. (One of the novel's more purple passages consists of an extended analogy between the "landscape" of the face and Poussin's sunsets.)

The narrator's sexuality is equally ambiguous. Angelo seems to derive his greatest pleasure from popping pimples, and the novel's big sex scene culminates with his ejaculating on Jaishree's made-over face. Angelo is always washing his hands and obsessing about whether or not he is wearing enough sunblock. Even his psychiatrist finally observes: "This fear of contamination from outside usually occurs in people who fear imperfections in themselves. . . . It goes along with the perfectionism and the hypochondriasis and everything else. I really think we should get to the heart of all this.... Are you sure you're not gay?"