The Sitter opens with a tableau, a scene detailed meticulously from both sides of a window in a hotel room in Paris. It’s not clear, at first, precisely who is looking, registering these details, nor where they might be positioned: all the reader is given is the image, piece by piece.
This only lasts a moment, but it’s a clever way to begin – unsettling and strangely distancing, but also emblematic of so many of the novel’s interests and what it attempts to do. The Sitter is, in many ways, a book about looking and being looked at, about depiction and all that it might mean. That this opening scene places the reader somewhere ambiguous and slippery, simultaneously within and external to what is being observed, is a skilful gambit and one that resonates across the rest of the novel.
The narrator soon reveals herself to be Marie-Hortense Fiquet Cézanne, the wife and frequent subject of the famous French painter Paul Cézanne (“Yes, that Cézanne,” she quips). Hortense, as she is known, is one of two people standing inside the hotel room in question; she is also long dead. She is not a ghost, exactly, though she has the shadowy, amorphous presence of one. She has been summoned to the side of an unnamed writer – who is also watching from the window, and who is in France to research and compile “the scrappy notes and bits of magic” from which she intends to write a novel about Hortense.
Hortense, then, is something more like an embodiment – however bodiless – of the writer’s novelistic fascination, the centre of her obsession. She is almost an imagined character and almost a muse – except that she resists both of these roles entirely, in part by making her own study of the writer as she works, but also by refusing to give access to her secrets and her inner self.
Hortense is not O’Keeffe’s first unconventional narrator, nor even her first to spring to life from a painted canvas. Her previous novel, Night Blue, published in 2021, was narrated, to startling effect, by Jackson Pollock’s painting Blue Poles; and like The Sitter, it too is a novel interested in the difficulty of separating art from the artist, and in the women who have been marginalised by male artists and art history. Hortense sat, she tells the reader, for 29 of her husband’s portraits across her life – and she describes each of these sittings as an act of endurance. But despite all of these portraits in her likeness and despite the fact that her relationship with Cézanne was the most significant of his life, she is generally given short shrift in studies of Cézanne’s art and life, if not belittled or dismissed entirely.
The writer in The Sitter, though, is drawn to one particular, enigmatic portrait in which Hortense seems as if she is about to move or speak. “All it takes is some detail like that, some impression,” she tells her daughter, “to make you want to write a book.”
What is most fascinating about The Sitter is its constant doublings of perspective. The writer is trying to glimpse or grapple with the historical figure of Hortense and Hortense is trying to understand the writer, each working within the limitations of their imagination and understanding. Each is thinking, too, of their own experiences of art and its creation – what it takes from life and transforms, as well as what it can’t quite frame.
But this doubling is quickly complicated and compounded, because the scene the pair are witnessing below them on the street compels the writer to leave aside her project about Hortense to write a different, ostensibly more personal story. This becomes a novel-within-the-novel, which Hortense reads while the writer sleeps, that is threaded with what Hortense calls “clues” – small echoes of details from Hortense’s portraits and biography and the time that she and the writer have shared.
The Sitter is intricately crafted in this way – recurrences, transfigurations and adaptations of details are threaded across the work, their resonance and meanings shifting and changing along the way. This rarely feels forced; all the more so because both its framing story and the embedded narrative are fiercely compelling. The technical playfulness, that is, never comes at the expense of the plot – either of them – and O’Keeffe’s balancing of these two elements is subtle and astute.
For all of its interest in imagination and art, and in looking and being seen, The Sitter is at its heart a novel about grief and love – and their frequent intertwining – as well as the sacrifices that women are compelled to make for love, and the ways in which women might resist, and reclaim themselves – however long after the fact.
The Sitter by Angela O’Keeffe is published by UQP ($29.99)
