Yes, I think that’s it. When Salo is in the art gallery with his companion, he tells her:
…about the sort of paintings he’d grown up with on the walls of his family’s New York apartment, the low-country landscapes and portraits of jolly women and smug, prosperous men. He did not tell her that some of those paintings had been donated to his university the very month he’d applied for admission; possibly he’d understood how crass, how outlandishly American such a gesture would have appeared to her (p. 18).
There are a few places losing Salo on 9/11 gets mentioned … something along the lines of they were always to be children of tragedy. However, the night of 9/10 ended the Oppenheimer family. If I remember correctly none of them returns to their college, including Harrison. He doesn’t go back to Roarke for his second year, does he? In addition, around this time he learns of Stella and a previously unknown half-brother. Sally struggles with the last words she ever said to her father. Lewyn’s personal life had just imploded. Not to mention Johanna’s with Salo leaving her for Stella. None of them could lean on the others for support. And I’m way less than certain that Salo could have pulled off his vision of a happier family, had he lived.
I’m thinking for the Oppenheimers, 9/10 contains as much tragedy as 9/11.
That’s a really good point, @Caraid. I didn’t lose anyone on 9/11, but living in the Boston area there are SO many connections–multiple memorials, relative of a co-worker, a close family friend of my partner’s, and on and on. We had visited the Twin Towers observation deck the year before. My older son had done a little tap dance for us on the state at the Winter Garden, which was obliterated. My younger son was 7 in 2001,and got a little 9/11 firehouse dalmation beanie baby he carried everywhere. For a long time he pretended it was wailing each night at 9:11. So while I agree with @ignatius that 9/10 had just as much tragedy for the family, I too would have expected 9/11 to have a much bigger impact.
Kudos to the author, for taking the reader on a journey of this dismal, dysfunctional family, to the point where, the drama of that beach reunion, and it’s aftermath, as @ignatius said, the family imploded, on 9/10. Everyone scattered into the wreckage, so when we read 9/11 and Salo, we are numb from the events.
Yes, 9/10 was the demise of the family as they knew it, their own personal 9/11 !
Sally cruelly outed
Lewyn lost his love
Rochelle devastated
Johanna husband abandoning them
That’s a lot,
Can’t remember Harrison, maybe not returning to college
Harrison does go back to Roarke (after some internal debate), but to your point, he’s unhappy – the place is not the same after the Carlos incident.
For Harrison, it was the breakdown of the camaraderie that hit him hardest. For the very first time in his life he’d found himself actually enjoying the company of male humans his own age, and this was after thirteen years of school, eight years of camp, and the incessant presence of a brother…For all the years he’d spent in the enforced comradeship of the Walden School, it was Roarke that had finally filled him with a sense of virtuous fellowship. Now all that was gone, or at least going fast.
Good good point. Yes, the Oppenheimers “scattered into the wreckage” (as @jerseysouthmomchess says) of their family on 9-10. However, as New Yorkers they must know numerous families - those of classmates, etc. - with lost family members. Places they had visited gone forever. Tragedy follows tragedy in their case.
Me too. Smart but obtuse. Obnoxious. But I don’t think he’s necessarily quite as motivated by power and money, so I think he’s redeemable. I’ve actually have some friends who had definitely Harrison tendencies, including being the smartest person in the room.
Well, having just been to the Harvard Art Museums, and having gone to the Johnson collection several times over the last few years, Cornell needs the art a lot more! I’ve always known that some percentage of the class has gotten in through big donations, I figure it makes it possible for people to also get the full scholarships. Of course, at a place like Harvard the endowment is so big everyone could have a free ride. (edited to add, the Cornell collection is lovely, just not very big.)
I don’t want to imply I speak for all New Yorkers, but New Yorkers tend to pride themselves on their resilience and the fact that the city gets back to normal fast after events that would flatten a “lesser” city. 9/11 was super-traumatic for those of us living there and it took months to even approach normalcy but I think most New Yorkers bounced back quicker than some other places. I now live in a different part of the country and people make a much bigger deal of 9/11 each year than most people (at least the ones I knew and know) do in NY. Obviously losing a family member changes that calculus and would make the anniversary much more difficult each year. But most NYers knew no one who died. 3,000 people is horrifying but a drop in the bucket in a city of 7 million. Many of those who worked in the financial services firms at the WTC lived in CT and NJ. A large number of others were firefighters and the Oppenheimer’s were unlikely to know any of them. So it’s entirely possible that other than Salo they knew no one else who died. They all left the city so didn’t live through those first few horrible months afterward. They were teenagers whose personal lives and family were imploding and whose father had just died. I actually think the depiction of their rxn was not unrealistic.
It visit a lot of museums, so I really liked the way art was so central to much of the book.
I hadn’t heard of “outsider art” but I recognized a lot of the other names. When I read the description of Salo’s experience encountering that first painting, I immediately thought it might be Twombly, since Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts just had a big exhibition of his work! Twombly was new to me when I saw the show and I did NOT have Salo’s reaction.
And just yesterday at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, I saw a small piece–not Twombly, but a work that involved scribbling on a book by Twombly–or maybe a book about Twombly…it was a bit too meta for me, and the wall tag wasn’t particularly clear.
Where did you find the painting that gave Salo the art attack, @Mary13? The description in the book sounded more like Twombly’s later work–but your example fits the time period and the use of crayon. Maybe the author blended the two?
Does anyone know if the other paintings described are real? The second painting Salo purchased (grey rectangles) sounds like Mark Rothko, only turned vertically. The third one “a mustard color with a thin vertical greenish stripe on the left edge and a crosshatch of lines at the top,” is supposed to depict an L.A. artist’s view of his city.
@Juno16, thank you for that insider’s perspective on 9/11. So interesting – and it gives me some context to better understand the Oppenheimers’ reaction.
@buenavista, I looked for an untitled Twombly online and what popped up in Wikiart looked at first like the correct piece, but you’re right, it’s not a match. The novel says Salo’s painting is part of the Blackboard series, but I can’t find one that quite fits the book’s description of the work. However, I do think the art in the book is real. From an interview with Jean Hanff Korelitz:
This is a book in which I put all the things I love. Antiques, Mormons, Jews, hoarders. I love the outsider artist named Achilles Rizzoli. I’ve always felt he didn’t get his due because he emerged at the same time as Henry Darger.
And the other art collection in the book—at one point it was Old Masters. I’m fortunate to know Steve Martin, and was able to pick his brain and create the other collection of art. By the end of the conversation, I had Salo’s list of acquisitions. It’s amazing to think that in a warehouse was a great collection he just wanted to enjoy.
@buenavista thanks for your link to the renown art institutions in Boston, Harvard certainly has impressive museums! Cornell’s is “quaint” in comparison.
I listened to you tube link, about a Cy Twombly’s exhibition, fast forwarded through some of it, because I bonk with much of the “outsider / modern art” !
But, relevant to cc conversation it was mentioned that Cy Twombly attended Black Mountain College, encouraged by Rauschenberg.
Talk about progressive, educational, equivalent to Roarke’s holistic approach, and were famed artists, writers, and poets!
Author JHK missed an opportunity to talk about an historic college that truly “ changed lives “
Just a plug for an independent, quirky movie, I’ve seen a couple of times, and the reason I knew about the concept of “outsider art”.
I thought about that movie, often, as I read the book.
Junebug,(2005)
is about a sophisticated Chicago art dealer, who travels to a small southern town, with the hopes of wooing an “ outsider artist” to allow her to exhibit his work.
And, this pbs, documentary about Virginia Maier, ( listed in the link above as one of ten famous “outsider artists”. The documentary is a fascinating story about a lonely Chicago nanny, who took 100,000 photographs, depicting life in the 1950s and 1960s. . She led a solitary life, but captured incredible candid scenes.
“ Vivian Maier (February 1, 1926 – April 21, 2009) was an American street photographer born in New York City. Although born in the U.S., it was in France that Maier spent most of her youth. Maier returned to the U.S. in 1951 where she took up work as a nanny and care-giver for the rest of her life. In her leisure however, Maier had begun to venture into the art of photography. Consistently taking photos over the course of five decades, she would ultimately leave over 100,000 negatives, most of them shot in Chicago and New York City. Vivian would further indulge in her passionate devotion to documenting the world around her through homemade films, recordings and collections, assembling one of the most fascinating windows into American life in the second half of the twentieth century.”
@buenavista thanks for mentioning Mark Rothko art, as I searched his work, I found this.
I thought Salo’s reaction to the Twombly painting was ridiculous, so overblown and dramatic.
But, now I realize such a reaction is not unheard of, and, what a I saw as a flaw in JHK book, is in fact not.
“ What is the meaning behind Mark Rothko paintings?
Mark Rothko sought to make paintings that would bring people to tears. “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on,” he declared. “And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions….”
@jerseysouthmomchess: We’ll generally let this discussion continue until around the 10th of the month and then switch to discussing what book to read next.
@abasket, just adding on to @VeryHappy’s post: Our discussions are every other month, so the book that we pick later this week will be discussed in August. The yearly schedule is February, April, June, August, October, December.
