Tom Rachman examines art world with buzzy new novel
TORONTO - Canadian novelist Tom Rachman has become a literary sensation in the past decade for his captivating look at itinerant characters in the worlds of journalism, used bookstores and most recently the fine arts.
His debut 2010 novel, the Rome newspaper tale “The Imperfectionists,” was widely acclaimed and developed into a screenplay by Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B. The film didn’t come to fruition, but the project is now in development as a TV series possibly for the BBC and HBO, he says.
Meanwhile, Rachman says “negotiations are ongoing” for the screen rights to his heralded new novel, “The Italian Teacher” (Doubleday Canada), which examines society’s fascination with artists through a family that lives in the shadow of a self-absorbed painter.
The story starts in Rome in 1955, where Bear Bravinsky is taking the fine-art world by storm with his expressionistic oil canvases that have many calling him a genius.
His socially inept son, Pinch, is always desperately seeking his father’s approval. Meanwhile his mother, a Montreal-born pottery artist, has mental-health issues and struggles to gain the same acclaim as Bear.
Readers are taken through several decades and cities — also including Toronto, New York and London — as Bear remarries several times and Pinch considers art fraud in a bid to secure his father’s legacy and make his own mark as a painter.
“I feel quite connected to this (book) right now, not least because some of the questions in it have become so timely given all the scandals in the arts about misconduct and abuse and all of that,” Rachman, a former journalist who was born in Toronto and raised in Vancouver, said in a recent interview.
“I think some of the questions in the book about what artists get away with and the awful behaviour of artists historically is something that feels quite present.”
This is Rachman’s third novel, after 2014’s “The Rise and Fall of Great Powers.”
He said he wanted to explore the lives of artists and how their children sometimes grapple with living up to their legacies.
He also wanted to look at the misbehaviour of some artists.
Rachman researched art fraud for the book and realized “it’s actually often quite easy to pull it off.”
“It’s really a world of reputation and handshakes,” he said, noting forensic tests often aren’t done on major works, partly because they could slightly damage a painting and also “that it would just be considered bad etiquette.”
In Rachman’s eyes, the structures that make for what’s considered “great art” are complicated, corrupted and not fair game.
“We have this notion that the great artists are the ones who, over time, are justly recognized,” Rachman said. “We’ll admit that in the moment that there are people that are fads and whatever but then over time the great ones are acknowledged, and I just don’t know that that’s true.
“I think the process that one must pass through to become an important painter ... would involve things like getting bought by the right people, getting into the right collections, those collections getting donated to the right museums, and the art historians and buyers of that time favouring that particular style.”