Asunder by Chloe Aridjis

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on September 17, 2013

As much a work of philosophy as fiction, Asunder is an impressive examination of the search for meaning in a solitary life. On one level, it is a love letter to art museums and their contents, the works of art and the humans who admire them. On another, it is a story of entropy, and of one woman's struggle to resist its pull.

Marie loves art, so hers seems to be the ideal job. She is a guard at the National Gallery, a career that lets her sit or stand all day, mostly unnoticed, contemplating art. Her friend Daniel was fired for excessive pacing and now works at Tate Britain, where the modern art troubled him before he adapted. Marie is content to be motionless and, like Daniel, she prefers to protect the old masters. In her free time she creates miniature landscapes from eggshells and moths. They are fantasy worlds into which time collapses, but eventually the moths disintegrate.

During the course of the novel, we learn about Marie's great-grandfather, who was a warder at the National Gallery in 1914, when a suffragette took a meat cleaver to a painting in an act of political protest; about Camden, where Marie spent her younger years and where, on a shopping trip with her morose flatmate, she reencounters her former lover; about Daniel's poetry and his penpal friendships with an international selection of poets he has never met; about the women who were once regarded as hysterics, posed and photographed for the benefit of their observers; and about Marie's long-abandoned penpal relationship with a prisoner (an example of the safely unavailable men to whom she is always drawn). We also learn about craquelure, the network of cracks that mark (and add depth to) an aging painting, and are invited to consider the quiet and largely unnoticed decomposition of paintings as a metaphor for life. Like paintings, people are always in the process of cracking apart, but they also gain a kind of hidden beauty as they age.

The first half of Asunder seems like an amiable character-centered novel with little in the way of plot development. A bit of understated drama ensues in the second half, when Marie and Daniel visit Paris to take advantage of an empty apartment that belongs to one of Daniel's unmet poet-friends. There they encounter some odd characters, including pensive Pierre, a poet from Stockholm who, in his rare waking moments, exerts an unnatural influence over Daniel -- or so it appears to the disgruntled Marie. One of the characters we meet is present for only a few pages but he plays a vital role. He is a living example of entropy, a man whose life has come apart.

Readers looking for plot-heavy, action-filled stories should look elsewhere. Asunder is not uneventful, but the events are small, and the reader needs to weave them together, to search for commonalities, to understand their importance. The key event comes near the novel's end, as Marie must decide how she wants to live her life. We might all disintegrate in the end, Chloe Aridjis seems to be saying, but we can embrace the inevitability of own craquelure and make the most of the time we have before we disintegrate.

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