Museum guard’s story too staid
Print Edition
There are few jobs more toothless than those of museum guards. Their cautions are irksome, their inattention worrying, their reflexes dulled by uneventful hours between bursts of activity. And yet, although poorly conditioned and compensated, they are called upon to protect rooms full of fragile, invaluable objects. Of those to whom little is given, much, apparently, is required.
Marie, the heroine of Chloe Aridjis’s second novel, “Asunder,” is the consummate warder. She whiles away the days with aplomb, finding dignity and peace patrolling the halls of the National Gallery in London, “half following an ancestral call,” her great-grandfather Ted having patrolled them before her. Unlike many of her colleagues, mostly retirees, Marie sees the work as neither stopgap nor supplementary. Unencumbered by ambition and anchored, somewhat obscurely, by her family link to the museum, Marie seems to have been born to play this part.
Nine years after inheriting her glacial profession, she has collected few acquaintances and still fewer friends. Tangled relationships are for others. Lucian and Jane, her unsympathetic flatmates, past and present, meet through Marie and immediately begin dating. When her closest friend, Daniel, leaves an opening for physical involvement, he’s met with paralyzed silence.
Marie’s uncluttered existence affords little scope for plot; an aborted vacation to northern England and an unsettling two-week stay in Paris are all that break up the narrative’s timid languor. By the Earl of Shaftesbury’s reckoning, “We polish one another, and rub off our corners and rough sides by a sort of amicable collision.” In Marie’s carefully observed solitude, there isn’t much collision.
There’s nothing particularly jovial about Mary Richardson, the bold suffragist who defaced Velázquez’s “Rokeby Venus” on Marie’s great-grandfather’s watch. Marie’s fascination with Richardson’s “impassioned diagonals” and the artist’s equally vigorous brushwork progressively take hold. She’s primarily interested in “craquelure” — cracks in the picture surface indicating friction, either gradual (the inevitable contraction of paint) or sudden (violent ruptures, around which lines cluster in concentric circles). These cracked webs are the measure of authenticity, of time and its effects. It’s not surprising that Marie, “content to carry out life at low volume” and always “more interested in being than becoming,” bears few such traces.
Marie becomes increasingly obsessed with painterly decay. A conservator guiding pupils through Marie’s gallery cites the German art historian and curator Max Jakob Friedländer: “Forged craquelure is arbitrary, monotonous and pedantic — whereas natural craquelure throbs with rich variety.” Here the distinction is unhappily made.
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