Infrared

Starred review from May 7, 2012
Huston’s exceptional new novel (after the Prix Femina Award–winning Fault Lines) chronicles a weeklong Italian trip taken by photographer Rena Greenblatt to celebrate her father’s 70th birthday. Trouble brews early when two teenagers are electrocuted near Rena’s home in Paris, sparking riots, and Rena’s lover/colleague urges her to come back to document the chaos. As Rena gets lost in an internal conversation with her imaginary sister, Huston expertly navigates past and present, taking us into vivid recollections of Rena’s absent lawyer mother, who killed herself; the secret alliances Rena shared with her scientist father, a one-time radical who didn’t live up to his potential; her complicated relationship with her older brother; her somewhat dim stepmother, Ingrid; her many affairs; and how all of it made her who she is. Huston makes her protagonist likable despite her irksome quirks: she’s short with her guileless stepmother, indignant and quick to start arguments with anyone who disagrees with her; in short, Rena feels truly real, which makes the novel’s abrupt ending all the more disappointing. Agent: Text Publishing Co., Melbourne, Australia.

July 15, 2012
A woman explores complex family relationships and discovers truths about herself in this sensual, intricately woven offering from award-winning Huston (Fault Lines, 2008, etc.). As freelance photographer Rena Greenblatt joins her aging father and abrasive stepmother in Italy for a dreaded week of vacation, the experience evolves into a period of self-reflection about her childhood, relationships, sensuality and self. Rena, a sexually uninhibited free spirit in her mid-40s, has had numerous lovers and husbands. Her chosen profession involves the use of infrared photography that allows her to "see" into the souls of her subjects during their most intimate moments. She is oddly reluctant to use her camera to document her trip and perhaps expose too many truths, but as she spends more time with her father and stepmother, slowly she peels away the complicated layers that encompass the intricate familial relationships that exist. Rena's imaginary sister and voice in her head, Subra--the backward spelling of deceased photographer Diane Arbus--poses probing questions that prompt revelations about Rena's background and her family: a once jealous and abusive older brother whom Rena loves, a mother who loved her but was always busy with her disadvantaged clients, and a philandering father, a doctoral candidate who once patterned himself after activist Timothy Leary and dropped acid with his daughter. As the week advances, Rena receives increasingly frantic phone calls from her French-born Algerian lover, who implores her to return to their home in France to document the race riots that are consuming the suburbs of Paris. But Rena, unwilling to affect an early departure, ignores his pleas as she faces the pivotal events of her past and reconciles these with the emotional reality of the present. Huston provides readers with more than a mere snapshot; her raw and sensual writing delivers the complete picture.

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February 1, 2012

Having survived childhood and two bad marriages, cutting-edge photographer Rena Greenblatt finds herself trapped in Florence with her fading father and impossible stepmother, contemplating both Renaissance masterpieces and memories of dark, sensual moments in her past. Several of Canadian author Huston's 11 novels are major award winners; Prix Femina winner Fault Lines is a personal favorite.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2012
Huston follows up Fault Lines (2008), winner of France's Prix Femina, with an intense story of a woman photographer on a one-week vacation in Florence, with her aging father and dimwitted stepmother. Attempting to deal with the tedious aspects of traveling with her parents while fielding frantic phone calls from her lover, a reporter caught up in the race riots that have exploded in Paris, she turns inward, subsumed by memories of her difficult childhood and her many sexual relationships. She specializes in infrared photography, for which she feels a certain affinity: I myself am the ultrasensitive filmcapturing invisible reality, capturing heat. And she shares her innermost thoughts and feelings with an imaginary half sister she calls Subra (an inverted spelling of Arbus, the photographer to whom she feels especially indebted). She writes frankly about sexual desire, her father's mortality, her brother's inappropriate sexual overtures, and her mother's suicide. So this is no easygoing Tuscany travelogue but, rather, a ruminative novel about the difficulties of coming-of-age and attaining true intimacy. An intricately written, thought-provoking examination of the power of both sexuality and art.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)