THE VANISHING POINT

The interwoven lives of artists, failed and successful.

Rye Adler evokes the late celebrity photographer Peter Beard in many ways: He seems to move easily in the world, gifted and carefree, and everyone recognizes him as a genius behind the lens. Yet something is not right in the now middle-aged man’s life, for when Brundage’s latest novel opens, a headline blares, “Rye Adler, Photographer of the Rich and Infamous, Is Presumed Dead at 52.” The focus shifts to Julian Ladd, classmate and roommate and rival, who early on realized that compared to Rye in most aspects, he was second-tier at most: “Editors would stare at his pictures, glumly, and say nothing.” So it was that Julian went into advertising, taking with him the one treasure that Rye could not have—Magda, a strikingly beautiful fellow photography student—and building a life of wealth and conspicuous consumption, all Armani suits and “shiny, expensive loafers.” Does it buy him happiness? Of course not. Rye is in turn married to a brittle, brilliant translator whose “favorite language is silence,” and each day is a negotiation in frustration. Things soon change from miserable to catastrophic when, the story shifting into the near past, Rye and Magda meet by chance—or is it?—and revelations begin to spill out. Brundage’s characters are convincing, if mostly of the sort you’d meet in the Hamptons or at tony Chelsea galleries; at its best and most emotionally fraught moments, her novel could be bookended by Christopher Bollen’s Orient and André Aciman’s Eight White Nights. The resolution, however, seems a bit pat, as does the complication that sends Rye’s life into free fall. One thing’s for sure, though: Readers will root for him over the willfully unfulfilled Julian, whose life consists of omitting “essential clues” and leaving it to others to “draw their own conclusions, which were almost always more complex and intriguing than any he’d intended.”

An elevated soap opera but a well-written and affecting one.