Art: Plain and Fancy Fiction

Eight linked stories tracing the history of a painting by the 17th-century Dutch artist, Vermeer. In one, he paints his daughter to pay off debts, a second story describes the loss of the ownership papers, a third takes place on the eve of its theft by the Nazis.

Victor LaBont is a world--class artist who attributes his creative ability to a chair he owns. When his home catches fire and Victor is severely burned trying to rescue the chair, he realizes the chair was stolen before the house was burned.

Dr. Sally Good is head of the English and Fine Arts Department at a community college on the Gulf Coast of Texas. It’s an easy-going place where the faculty is more likely to write articles for music magazines than pompous literary rags. A popular professor dies under suspicious circumstances – rumors veer between sexual hijinks and/or Satanism. Dr. Good must run the department – and find the killer.

During their privileged, eccentric English childhood, Jack Rathbone enjoyed the unstinting adoration of his sister, Gin. So when both are art students in London, it is wrenching for her to watch him fall under the spell of Vera Savage, a flamboyant and reckless painter from Glasgow.

Jack and Vera run off to New York City within weeks of meeting, and from a bruised, bereft distance Gin follows their progress south through Miami and pre-revolutionary Havana to Port Mungo, a seedy town in the mangrove swamps of Honduras. There, in an old banana warehouse, Jack obsessively devotes himself to his canvases while Vera succumbs to a chronic restlessness that not even the birth of two daughters can subdue.