Parallel Lives

A painting is a composition in shapes, textures and colours. A novel is a composition in language—which is flexible enough to include all of the above. A life can be a composition too, whose bits and pieces fit meaningfully together according to some principle of design. Painters and writers, while their common currency is structure, have long denied that their lives exhibit any particular aesthetic coherence. “Perfection of the life, or of the work,” according to Yeats, is the stark dichotomy that each artist must confront, and it is axiomatic that the latter takes priority over the former. Still and all, the potential must surely exist in the self-reflective artist in either medium for the life and the work to echo one another.

The possibility so much intrigues Helen McLean in this, her fourth novel, that she doubles the odds. The Man and the Woman is a sophisticated study of the lives of two painters. One is the Post-Impressionist master Pierre Bonnard...