Life of David Hockney

March 15, 2019
A fictionalized life of the gay British painter who came to define and embody California dreaming.Many have tried to put into words the tumultuous life of the much-loved British David Hockney, but few have captured his essence. In this novel, Cusset (The Story of Jane, 2001, etc.) traces Hockney's life from his first encounter with art as a child to his sexual awakening to the bursts of luck and opportunity that punctuated his career to his heartbreak, in so many senses of the word. Cusset paints a picture that, for those familiar with Hockney's work and life, feels hyper-realistic. In fact, it's often hard to draw the line between biography and novel--perhaps this is what gives the book its strength. "David knew that success didn't just fall from the sky. In New York he had admired what in England would have been considered bad taste: the ease with which Americans knew how to sell themselves, without getting bogged down in false shame and feelings of guilt," Cusset says through the omniscient narrator. The sentence summarizes Hockney's understanding of the art world: one where personalities thrive and personal histories crumble, where taste dominates and timidity falters. So begins Hockney's eccentric career as an explicitly gay artist living in the world; from London to San Francisco to Paris to Los Angeles, there isn't a cosmopolitan city his work hasn't touched. Cusset discusses with grace the heart-wrenching relationship with Peter Schlesinger--the primary male subject of most of Hockney's early- and midcareer paintings--that the artist watched dissolve. "Peter was sexier than Marilyn, sexier than the living doll in the song by Cliff Richard that David liked so much. A boy doll. David would have given his kingdom for a kiss." Cusset's style oozes with delicacy, pointedness, and gusto. She masters the short sentence, enlivening the narrative with the speed of Hockney's rise to fame--a speed that comes to perfectly mirror his experience with the AIDS epidemic, friends dying too quickly all around him.A perfect short exposé of Hockney's life as seen through the eyes of an admiring novelist.

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Starred review from May 1, 2019
What looks like a biography and reads like a biography is not necessarily a biography in the face of this tour de force offered as evidence of fluidity in what defines a novel. David Hockney, British painter, printmaker, and opera-set designer, has been a major figure in the art world since the 1960s; his continued influence and relevance are strongly recognized in continual major exhibitions around the world and monographs on his work. Award-winning French novelist Cusset brilliantly integrates the selectivity of detail enjoyed by a novelist with the more formal structure usually exercised in a nonfiction account. The result is an acute view of Hockney that, soon into its pages, convinces the reader to lose any concern over the line between biography and fiction and to, instead, avidly pursue the growing desire to learn what exactly Cusset has to teach us about Hockney's developing artistic sensibilities and growing comfort with his homosexuality as his creative life takes shape and sustains him through times sorrowful and bright.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)