The greatest kindness

"Don't tell me too much," Henry James is supposed to have said, when some anecdote vibrated him to the prospect of a story. "Don't tell me too much!"

Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

Like Tracy Chevalier's novel Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999), Christina Baker Kline's A Piece of the World (2017) offers a fictional exploration of the story behind a famous painting. Both novels are exceptional, but there is one essential difference in the writing of the two books.

Nothing is known about the girl in Johannes Vermeer's famous painting. Chevalier made up virtually the entire story, except for some historical details known about Vermeer himself and the Dutch city of Delft in the 17th century. Christina's World, on the other hand, was painted by Andrew Wyeth in the mid-1940s. Much is known about Wyeth, about Christina Olson, the woman in the painting, and about the house in the background where most of Kline's story takes place.

So which author faced the greater challenge, Chevalier who knew next to nothing about her painting or Kline who started writing with the outline of a story already in place? Kline had the advantage of a place to start, the disadvantage of having so many possible plot options closed off to her. Chevalier  had the advantage of being able to take her story in any direction she chose, the disadvantage of not having any story at all when she began her work. From the comment by Henry James that Wallace Stegner gives us in his own novel Angle of Repose, we see that he would have favored a middle position, knowing just enough of a story to fire his imagination, but not so much that it would stifle that imagination.

As I indicated, both novels impress me, but my subject here is Kline's novel. It begins with a young Andrew Wyeth being drawn to the old house on a Maine hill where Christina lives with her brother Al. He sets up a studio in the house, where he returns each summer. At the novel's end he unveils his painting of Christina on that hill. In between, however, the main focus of the novel is Christina's life, lived under the curse of a hereditary disease that gradually weakens her limbs until eventually she can only crawl from one place to another, up and down stairs.

There's an unhappy love affair and strained relationships with family members and neighbors. What others see as kindness, she rejects it as pity. She is too proud even to sit in a wheelchair, too stubborn to seek medical care. Her brother stays by her, though with his own reasons for anger and resentment.

Christina loves Emily Dickinson poetry and finds many of the poet's lines meaningful to her. Kline gives Christina, our narrator, some meaningful lines of her own as she tells her story. For example, "This life of ours can feel an awful lot like waiting." Or, "The older I get, the more I believe that the greatest kindness is acceptance." Much of her life she seems to spend waiting for Andrew Wyeth and Betsy, her former neighbor who becomes his wife. And then their acceptance brightens her little piece of the world.