Name: The Painter
Rating: 4 (6 reviews)
ISBN: 9780385352093

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

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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