THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 21, 1995 TAG: 9505200255
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY AUDREY KNOTH
LENGTH: Medium: 75 lines
THE MATISSE STORIES
A.S. BYATT
Random House. 134 pp. $17.
IN A SOCIETY that venerates the fast-changing array of ``celebrities'' on magazine covers and television talk shows, a painter - one dead more than 40 years - may seem irrelevant.
Author A.S. Byatt deftly swims against the contemporary cultural tide in her collection The Matisse Stories. In each of the book's three short pieces, the paintings of Henri Matisse touch the lives of very modern women.
The first story, ``Medusa's Ankles,'' takes place in what for many women is a den of solace and discomfort - the beauty salon. The protagonist, a middle-aged academic, chooses to have her hair styled there because she spots a print of Matisse's ``Rosy Nude'' in the reception area.
``That was odd, she thought, to have that lavish and complex creature stretched voluptuously above the coat rack, where one might have expected the stare, silver and supercilious or jetty and frenzied, of the model girl. . . The rosy nude. . . had huge haunches and a monumental knee, lazily propped high.''
The salon's owner handles her no-longer-youthful hair with respect, giving her a modicum of satisfaction with her appearance. ``Short and bouncy was best, Lucian said, and proved it, tactfully. . . She came to trust him with her disintegration.''
But the beauty parlor undergoes a redecorating; the Matisse painting is replaced by ``photographs of girls with grey faces, coal-black eyes and spiky lashes, under bonfires of incandescent puce hair.'' Her feelings about the salon, and herself, change, leading to a startling and ironic ending.
Matisse's treatment of the female body figures heavily in the story ``The Chinese Lobster.'' Dr. Gerda Himmelblau, a university dean of women students, confronts an art professor over allegations that he humiliated and molested a female degree candidate. (The accusations are laid out in a letter the woman sends Himmelblau; its muddled thinking and grammar are a neat send-up of modern education.)
The student's dissertation topic is ``The Female Body and Matisse.'' Himmelblau and the accused professor discuss Matisse's voluptuousness of style, the student's anorexia and the pleasures of the palette and palate in a lunch meeting that reaches no clear conclusion, but makes both academics think anew.
In ``Art Work,'' Byatt explores domestic life and the life of the imagination. The story, sparked by Matisse's ``Le Silence habite des maisons,'' portrays the ``inhabited silence'' of the home occupied by a successful magazine art director and her husband, a failing artist. With two children, the house never lacks noise of some kind. But there's a terrible quiet between the couple, whose marriage is ebbing.
Byatt's talent gleams as she describes the humdrum sounds that fill the home: ``There is the churning hum of the washing-machine, a kind of splashy mechanical giggle, with a grinding note in it, tossing its wet mass one way, resting and simmering, tossing it the other. . . . ''
As in many households, the family's fragile emotional balance rests on the housekeeper and her willingness to keep domestic chores running smoothly. Events erupt when she flexes her power in a surprising way.
Byatt's best-known work, the novel Possession, earned the Booker Prize. With The Matisse Stories, she again displays her breathtaking writing gift. This new collection has only one drawback - it's too short. These three remarkable stories whet the appetite for more.
- MEMO: Audrey Knoth is a free-lance writer and executive director of public
relations at Goldman & Associates in Norfolk. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket design by ANDREA PINNINGTON
by CNB