BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Marriage of Opposites’

OPINION:

THE MARRIAGE OF OPPOSITES

By Alice Hoffman

Simon & Schuster, $27.99, 384 pages

Alice Hoffman is a lyrical writer and in her novel, “The Marriage of Opposites,” her descriptive talents are on full display.

Based on life of Rachel Pomie, the mother of noted impressionist Camille Pissarro, and set on the tropical island of St. Thomas in the 1800s, Ms. Hoffman depicts a determined and unconventional woman whose Jewish ancestors fled the Spanish Inquisition and found shelter and roots in the welcoming Danish port of Charlotte Amelie. “A small speck of land, little more than thirty square miles set in the blue-green sea,” an island drenched with color “so that shades of orange and blue and red were scattered everywhere.”

Ms. Hoffman portrays a veritable wonderland of crimson sunsets, hidden forests and waterfalls “[w]here the scent of jasmine frangipani were dizzying”along with mythical creatures, ghosts and spirits who fly or roam about.

She writes about passion, betrayal and disappointment, but here’s the problem: The narrative tends to get overwhelmed by her lavish prose and tells us little about the thoughts of Rachel’s artistic son yearning desperately to paint.

The plot centers on life of Rachel Comie Petit Pizzarro, her son changed the spelling to Pissarro when he moved to Paris, the daughter of a prosperous shipping merchant, a pillar of the small Jewish community, and a stern, forceful mother.

Well-read and imaginative, Rachel longed for the high life in Paris, but instead was married off to an elderly widower, Isaac Petit, with three children in order to prop up her father’s failing business.

When Petit died six years later Rachel, with three children of her own, was smitten by his dashing nephew Fredric, seven years her junior, when he arrived from France to manage his uncle’s affairs. It was a coup de foudre and their liaison and marriage scandalized the Jewish community. Because Rachel had married her deceased husband’s nephew they were considered outcasts, shunned and barred from the synagogue and all its activities. Their children were forced to attend the predominantly black Protestant Moravian school. (Pissarro never forgot those years as an outsider and upon his death specified that his estate be split between the synagogue and St. Thomas’ Protestant church.)

Jacobo Camille (he later ditched his first name) was the third child of this improbable match, and Rachel’s favorite although she continually discouraged and disparaged his desire to paint.

When the story switches back and forth between Camille and the complicated lives of fictional characters things begin to go awry.

The facts are as follows. When Camille was 12, his father sent him to boarding school in France where he developed a fascination for the masters of French art. His teachers suggested he draw from nature when he returned to St. Thomas, which he did when he was 17. Unfortunately, his father had other plans, giving him a job as a cargo clerk, “a fate he dreaded as surely as if he had a prison sentence hanging over him.”

Inexplicably Rachel raged over his obvious talent, mocking and occasionally destroying his paintings.

When he turned 21, a Danish artist, Fritz Melbye, then living on St. Thomas, became his teacher and friend and convinced Pissarro to paint full time. The two took off for Venezuela where they spent the next two years. He drew everything he could, including landscapes, village scenes and numerous sketches, enough to fill up multiple sketch books.

He returned to St. Thomas once again to help with the family business, and finally left for Paris, this time for good, with the blessing and financial support of both his parents. Ironically, his mother followed and set up housekeeping shortly thereafter.

In a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction scenario Pissarro married his mother’s kitchen maid, Julie, against his mother’s violent objection and though they had seven children, Rachel never accepted Julie as her daughter-in-law.

Pissaro studied with Corot and made close friends with all the fledgling impressionists of the period: Renoir, Sisley, Gauguin and became a mentor, father figure to Paul Cezanne among others. He was considered their dean. As Mary Cassatt noted, he was “such a teacher that he could have taught the stones to draw correctly.”

The book has many lovely, idyllic moments and produced a couple of unintended results. One, I wanted to book a trip St. Thomas and, most important, I went to the National Gallery Art in Washington to see the Pissarros.

Unfortunately, they had none of his paintings or sketches of the island on view, but his scenes in and around Paris are gorgeous. I understand why he is considered one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.

• Sandra McElwaine is a Washington correspondent for The Daily Beast.