‘You fascinate me, Alison,” says Patrick, “with your big eyes and that wretched jumper.” Patrick Kerr, who visits Alison’s Dorset town in the late 1970s to teach an art class, is the former enfant terrible of portraiture known as “the last great painter”. Alison is a newly married young woman baffled by adulthood. Kerr’s portraits of her – including Alison Reclines, Alison and Aspidistra and Alison Sleeps – will be highlights in his glittering career. But this isn’t his story. Instead, Stewart’s affectionate and beautifully pitched account follows Alison from uncertain teenager to successful modern-day artist.
The fictional Kerr is, as you might have gathered, a self-satisfied bore, and Alison spends much of her life inching out of his shadow. But Stewart renders their relationship and its fallout with a nuance and care that runs throughout her first full-length adult work. The setup is brief but effective. Alison grows up in a small town with her parents and older brother: “We were certainly ordinary, which made us assume that we must be happy.” She marries a local council worker, knuckles down as a housewife in a chilly, cliff-set house and searches for the hobby that, her husband tells her, will fill her days.
