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Synopsis
John Ordway is an artist obsessed with his work. In New York City that preoccupation merely aroused the ire of feminist art critics, but now that he and his girlfriend, Jamie, a potter and weaver, have retreated to tiny Delphi, Iowa, he finds himself the object of a more pointed suspicion.
Then Jaime leaves him, and one of his local models is attacked. Surrounded by judgment and no longer able to view his work with detachment, he is forced to question the impulses that drive him to it. As events spin out of control, he must answer questions of urgent personal importance: What is the fate of a body in the world? And what does it mean for a man to see a woman truly?
Art collides with life, painfully and revealingly, in this evocative first novel, which brings a poet's sensibility to the charged question of women's bodies and men's desires. Subtly conceived and artfully executed, THE MADHOUSE NUDES is part love story, part mystery, a brave exploration of guilt and innocence.
Publishers Weekly
John Ordway, the protagonist of Schultz's compelling but flawed first novel, is a painter whose subject matter, the female nude, gets him into hot water not only with feminist art critics in Manhattan but also with the suspicious population of the small Iowa town where he and his girlfriend have relocated to escape the distractions of New York. After his girlfriend leaves him, John has a nervous breakdown and is briefly institutionalized. Both his unsteady mental state (at one point, he dramatically sets fire to, then hoses down, his own work) and his scandalous paintings make him an outcast. Then one of his models is attacked and nearly raped by a man who plants one of John's gloves at the scene. John immediately becomes the prime suspect in the assault, a crime that the chronically self-doubting artist isn't sure he didn't commit. In contrast to Schultz's subtle characterizations and insights about love and work in the art world, the mystery aspect of this tale strains credulity and undermines narrative flow. The novel unfolds through a series of letters sent by John to his best friend, a gallery owner in New York, a contrivance that also occasionally intrudes on the action. While Schultz is an observant writer, his quiet lyricism and gracefully understated impressions of human behavior are at odds with the heavy-handed plotting, weakening an otherwise promising debut. (Apr.)