What I find compelling about novels whose protagonists are artists and writers is the way these stories lay bare the full and varied lives creative people lead. So much of a creative person’s background and daily life is demystified in these stories that show that inspiration or lack thereof exists in the throes of the same drudgery, tragedies, and joys that populate other lives, that talent and creativity can thrive in the most unlikely environment and may die out in the places one would think to look for them. I chose a list that includes a crime novel featuring an artist in Wales, a literary novel filled about young, unfocused writers which is driven by character rather than plot, one in which the values of the hippie generation align with those of poetry and art, and one about a travel writer and his family reeling from a loss.
Clare Mackintosh’s I Let You Go
The crime writer’s debut, which remains her strongest work so far, is set in the seclusion of the Welsh countryside. A woman called Jenna Gray, plagued by terrible memories, arrives in a quiet, tourist town along the coast during the off-season and settles into a life that involves few interactions with other people. An artist in her old life, she takes on commissioned photography projects as a way to support herself. I won’t spoil any of the details for you, but gradually Jenna’s careful bifurcation of past and present begins to fall apart. It’s a gripping read with likeable characters – a book I read cover-to-cover in a single sitting.
Andrew Martin’s Early Work
I read Early Work because numerous reviewers confessed that they couldn’t explain why a lazy, privileged, and amoral young man made a compelling character – they could only say that in the hands of this particular writer, he held the reader’s attention. If you’re a writer, or for that matter any other kind of creative individual, you’ll have met someone like the protagonist Peter – tiresomely wasteful of their time and resources, unable to commit to a project. Martin’s masterful novel uses a small cast of characters – Peter and the two women in his life, Julia and Leslie, who also aspire to write – to comment (though not to judge) on the lives of these overeducated and underemployed liberal arts graduates, aimlessness, and the vague calling to be a writer. One of the reasons I’ve included this book because it shows artists of a different ilk who are at an early, unfocused point in their creative journey.
Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist
Much like Alice Munro, Anne Tyler’s writing has consistently followed the lives of ordinary people and their families – recognising that even the quietest life contains the minutia of conflicts and sorrows. In The Accidental Tourist, Macon Leary is a travel writer who has carved a niche for himself telling people how to feel at home in the places they visit. Leary’s readers are people like him – anxious and unwilling to leave the comforts and familiarity of home and looking to maintain their routine and diet wherever they go. It’s a sensitively written novel that follows Leary as his marriage falls apart a year after the untimely death of his son, and he moves back into his childhood home to piece together a new life in the aftermath of loss.
Ann Hood’s Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine
Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, is the kind of book you can read anytime, anywhere. There’s an accessibility in her prose that’s largely missing from literary fiction, and if you haven’t read in a while, Somewhere is a book to consider turning to. Set between the 60s and the 80s, the novel follows a group of three young women who pursue love, activism, hippie values, and art. As they grow older and form their own families, they find the world around them changing and discover devastatingly that the circumstances of one’s life aren’t controlled by good intentions and hard work alone. It’s Hood’s best-known work for a reason – her other novels don’t retain the simple charm of this story.