HANDS AND STRAIGHT LINES

Bradsher-Fredrick’s debut novel explores a man’s life through the prism of minute details.

Notoriously difficult to render, hands and straight lines are considered by Edward Rawlinson to be the trickiest subjects and most important metric for being an artist: “Hands and straight lines engaged me. I applied myself consciously to those two subjects to such an extent that, although I dimly mistrusted dichotomies, I divided the world into ‘hands’ and ‘straight lines.’ ‘Hands' and ‘straight lines’ became huge, ill-defined, virtually limitless categories into which I divided much of my experience.” In this novel, which reads more like a memoir, the author crafts short chapters about Edward, a young, gay, aspiring painter, charting the significant moments of his personal and artistic journey. Edward recounts his whimsical obsession with watercolors; his graduation to more pigmented, expensive paints; touring the art and points of interest of Turkey and Mexico with his brother, Burke; his bond with his great-aunt, Estelle, and her ornate home of treasures; playing jacks with a local girl, Christine; his fear of horses; his not-so-secret love of a college professor (“I felt that I could not endure the details about Professor Baussan that bit into me while normal things happened”); and many other elements that add up to define a life and an artistic sensibility. In addition to Edward’s painting practice, the book charts many of the supporting characters’ passions, including equestrianism, crochet, and drawing. As he comes to terms with his sexuality and the depths of his desires, Edward must decide which among his relationships with friends and family are worth saving and which he must forgo for the sake of living the life he wants.

Bradsher-Fredrick has created a novel the way artists create collages, mosaics, and still lifes, combining small, mercurial moments to create an overall impression and arc. Edward’s narration is full of ruminating, tangible details that poignantly allude to his artistic eye: “The violet shapes, crocheted discs and parts of discs, coarsely—painfully—imitated grape clusters…I’d painted, that morning, as if no fence existed, as if no fence existed beyond the bushy fountains, as if no knives existed under cut flowers.” Unfortunately, his delivery is occasionally marred by strangely clunky lines (“Friendly, Christine treated me as a friend”; “I felt his weight: thrillingly bodily”). Despite the prose’s compelling imagery, the author’s nonlinear and anecdotal treatment of Edward’s life quickly becomes convoluted and confusing, disrupting momentum to move around in time and poring over the same moments of Edward’s life across multiple chapters; the lack of discrete scenes and action make it hard to understand any characters other than Edward, who readers are never really given a full description of. No consistent plot emerges until Edward goes away to college and meets “the fiery lining” of his life, his professor, Lawrence Baussan, who is 20 years his senior. Even their tender relationship comes to feel redundant; the book never answers the question of what Edward’s story means.

Compelling prose hampered by a lack of momentum and dynamism.