Peter Heller

Struggling with dark impulses after serving time for attempted murder, a successful artist gives in to his obsessions to kill an abusive troublemaker before fleeing authorities and the man's vengeful clan. By the author of the best-selling The Dog Stars. 75,000 first printing.

A Novel

The Painter

Shona Tiger

Hated the "protagonist" so much right at the start and through most of the book... But this is a really beautiful read. It will stay with me for some time.

Cindy Lieberman

Thoughtful and beautifully written. One complex character's struggle to deal with loss.

Melody Izard

This book is a straddler. There were times that I had trouble believing in the main character, Jim Stegner. A fishing surfing killing alcoholic philosophizing painter. He was rough and sensitive. Loving and distant. At times I'd be right smack in the middle of the river and the whole thing would just work. And then it would feel contrived and made up and just a compilation of ideas. Then it would go right back to working. 

There are beautiful philosophical paintings. There are brutal killings that seem like the world is a better place because the shiftless sons of a bitches are gone - and then we see the void that they left. You can not separate the human soul from the brutal horse beater. You want to. But you can not.

There is always that quick shift in the current of the river of life and the the flow of the story to make you think out loud and wonder if you get it at all. No you don't. But that is life. I pronounce this book worth it.

Daryl Houston

Really liked this one. I had read and liked The Dog Stars, and when I happened to see The Painter in a book store (I hadn't known Heller had written another novel), I snapped it right up. It is I suppose sort of a rugged, manly story of a painter trying to figure out how to live in the world a few years after a traumatic event wrecks his life.

The prose is lyrical and often lovely. The story tugged me right along. There's something like profundity here and there about art, about suffering, about perseverance as an inmate of the world.

There's also lots of writing about fishing. If you find that sort of thing tiresome, this might not be the book for you. As I'm trying to pick up the habit, the fishing passages were well timed for me.

The Painter A Novel

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