Ray Hanrahan, a 60-something washed-up art star, refers to Anna Karenina's famous opener--"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"--when he launches Charlotte Mendelson's The Exhibitionist like so: "Tolstoy was an idiot." Ray should know from idiots. His gleeful misanthropy blinds him to the glorious center of his life, who is also the center of this bitterly funny novel: Ray's brilliant, beyond-put-upon sculptor wife, Lucia.
The Exhibitionist covers a three-day stretch in 2010, during which Ray intends to make a comeback: there's Friday's celebratory inner-circle dinner at the ramshackle London home of the rambling, shambolic Hanrahan family, followed on Saturday by a show of Ray's work. It's to be "the most important weekend of my tragic life," he says.
Lucia, whose deference to her husband makes her seem like the woman whom feminism forgot, is so busy preparing for Ray's relaunch that when her gallerist phones on Friday, she doesn't take the call. Lucia managed to balance family and art-making until three years earlier when she was treated for cancer; she couldn't bring herself to work for a year. Hindering her recovery were Ray's usual confidence-eroding quips plus a fresh method of cruelty: his poorly concealed affair with his osteopath.
The Exhibitionist is keenly observed (someone is "talking to a woman with lady-novelist hair and what Ray calls menopause jewelry"), and its roving point of view yields insights from all key players, including Lucia's and Ray's three adult children, for whose shortcomings Ray unblinkingly blames Lucia. Perhaps even more than an unhappy-family novel, The Exhibitionist is a comeuppance novel to savor. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer