Girl With a Pearl Earring

January 3, 2000
The scant confirmed facts about the life of Vermeer, and the relative paucity of his masterworks, continues to be provoke to the literary imagination, as witnessed by this third fine fictional work on the Dutch artist in the space of 13 months. Not as erotic or as deviously suspenseful as Katharine Weber's The Music Lesson, or as original in conception as Susan Vreeland's interlinked short stories, Girl in Hyacinth Blue, Chevalier's first novel succeeds on its own merits. Through the eyes of its protagonist, the modest daughter of a tile maker who in 1664 is forced to work as a maid in the Vermeer household because her father has gone blind, Chevalier presents a marvelously textured picture of 17th-century Delft. The physical appearance of the city is clearly delineated, as is its rigidly defined class system, the grinding poverty of the working people and the prejudice against Catholics among the Protestant majority. From the very first, 16-year-old narrator Griet establishes herself as a keen observer who sees the world in sensuous images, expressed in precise and luminous prose. Through her vision, the personalities of coolly distant Vermeer, his emotionally volatile wife, Catharina, his sharp-eyed and benevolently powerful mother-in-law, Maria Thins, and his increasing brood of children are traced with subtle shading, and the strains and jealousies within the household potently conveyed. With equal skill, Chevalier describes the components of a painting: how colors are mixed from apothecary materials, how the composition of a work is achieved with painstaking care. She also excels in conveying the inflexible class system, making it clear that to members of the wealthy elite, every member of the servant class is expendable. Griet is almost ruined when Vermeer, impressed by her instinctive grasp of color and composition, secretly makes her his assistant, and later demands that she pose for him wearing Catharina's pearl earrings. While Chevalier develops the tension of this situation with skill, several other devices threaten to rob the narrative of its credibility. Griet's ability to suggest to Vermeer how to improve a painting demands one stretch of the reader's imagination. And Vermeer's acknowledgment of his debt to her, revealed in the denouement, is a blatant nod to sentimentality. Still, this is a completely absorbing story with enough historical authenticity and artistic intuition to mark Chevalier as a talented newcomer to the literary scene. Agent, Deborah Schneider.

Vermeer's evocative painting is the inspiration for this novel of sixteenth-century Delft about a young girl who goes to work as a servant in the home of the painter and becomes his subject. Tracy Chevalier tells the story from the perspective of the girl, Griet, who is intrigued by the painter as she cleans his studio, studies his paintings, and comes to know something of the interrelationships among the painter's wife, his many children, and his mother-in-law. Jenna Lamia infuses this glimpse into Vermeer's world with a girlish curiosity and innocence, capturing both the freshness of youth and the stirrings of womanhood. Other characters are also well presented; the jealousy of Vermeer's oldest daughter, the wisdom of his mother-in-law, and the painter's own quiet desperation are all expressed fully. Through the marriage of insightful prose and expressive narration, the listener feels a part of this world. It is a glimpse as intimate as one of Vermeer's own paintings. M.A.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine