The American Painter Emma Dial: A Novel

By Samantha Peale

Book Overview

Emma Dial is a virtuoso painter who executes the works of Michael Freiburg, a preeminent figure in the New York art world. She has a sensuous and exacting hand, hips like a matador, and long neglected ambitions of her own. She spends her days completing a series of pictures for Freiburg's spring exhibition and her nights drinking and dining with friends and luminaries. Into this landscape walks Philip Cleary, Emma's longtime painting hero and a colleague and rival of her boss. Philip Cleary represents the ideal artistic existence, a respected painter, fearless and undeterred by fashion. He is unmatched by anyone from Emma's generation. Except, just possibly, Emma herself. Emma Dial must choose between the security of being a studio assistant to a renowned painter and the unknown future as an artist in her own right. Samantha Peale writes with astonishing insight about a young woman who risks everything to fulfill her ambitions as an artist.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 039306820X
• ISBN13: 9780393068207
• Release Date: May 2009
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.6" x 1.2" x 5.9"

Customer Reviews

A Great Novel

If you read a book,it is always an investment of the most valuable capital: time. Once you start reading THE AMERICAN PAINTER EMMA DIAL you soon will notice that your investment was a good one and that you don't waste your time.You won't stop reading until you finished the book. Samntha Peale brings you into the New York art world, but don't worry, even if you do not care much about the artistic milieu, Samntha Peale did not write an art-book or a book about art, she wrote about people working in the art business. And she did that brilliantly; not praising a hero or or condemning a villain, not pleading for a certain doctrine or fighting against an idiology. Samantha Peale is an engaged spectator, describing people, sometimes critical, even sarcastic, and often very funny; never offending or vulgar and always with a great understanding for the strengths and weaknesses of human nature. The story of a young woman, "who gave everything about her: her youth, her body, her talent,her commitment to painting to one man, and now wanted it all back"... is fascinating. I read the book with pleasure and emotion and I shall not forget it. Hopefully we haven't to wait to long until Samantha Peale comes up with her next great novel.

Art and Power

Samantha Peale is especially adept at writing about power in the elite art world, in all its shifting forms--a dance between those who have it and those who want more of it; those who can purchase a ticket with their wealth, thus linking themselves; and those, like Emma Dial, on the periphery and in the background, who want to extricate art from power, in service to art, although for Emma, the two are complexly held together. The maneuverings behind the scenes are adroitly written, in service to keeping the art titans firmly in place. Everything is measured in relation to this mix of art and power, including friendships; and, while many fall to the wayside, Emma Dial is at the brink, having to decide whether to continue to lose herself to the fiscally rewarding safety of her employer/lover's shadow, or to break away, by whatever means necessary, to the enormous risk of being an artist in her own right. With Emma Dial, we're given a different kind of heroine: unsentimental, with a steady unwavering perceptive voice; hiding behind the reputation of her employer, doing the work while he receives the glory; able, yet insecure about the follow through, the blustery, ego-driven selling, that she knows is necessary; and, for the most part, two or three paces ahead of everyone else.

A wonderful read.

It's been a long time since I found myself pulled along by a character and a story the way I found myself pulled along by The American Painter Emma Dial. The book is set in the New York art world, which should be a forbidding, intimidating place, but Emma's voice is so assured, direct and so without affect that you soon are as at home in the setting as she has become after seven years working for a famed painter. And as off-hand about what the work of a famed painter's assistant turns out to be: making the actual paintings. It's what Emma Dial does; that, and sleep with him, and otherwise render the services that she has allowed to waylay her own promise and ambition. The engine of the story is her craving to reclaim those, and break free of The Great Man. Which all might sound kind of internal and meditative, perhaps. So why was the only question I remember asking as I tore through the heart of the book: "What happens next?" It's a cracking read, propulsive and yet as calm as Emma, who has an eye to match the author's ear. Reading writing like this is like drinking a glass of cold water when you didn't realize how thirsty you were.

portrait of the artist as a woman

In the first half of this book, the descriptions of the daily life of a painter's assistant in downtown New York have a vividness, a suffused quality that places and people in your life take on when they are about to be irrevocably lost. The main character, Emma, is in a rut, yet Peale's writing makes her behavior and surroundings--smoking all night, listening to the same song over and over again, dinner with cherished, flawed friends--captivating to read. Our main character, maybe anti-hero, Emma, is not so much alienated as unsentimental, and this, I think we're meant to understand as her real promise as an artist. Her emotional vulnerability is not what propels the story or organizes the details. Rather, the book progresses the way the creative labor of painting and the creative labor of making a life for yourself progress. Once Emma gets out from under her mentor/boss/lover's successful and gorgeous shadow, the book shifts location and tone. From the character and detail-crowded setting of a very inhabited New York to a strongly-lit loneliness in Florida, where our heroine is a stranger. And Peale's description evokes the shifting moods of leaving, setting out, staring new, in her character. As someone who has lost one life and started another, I really related to Emma Dial. I've never read a description of the slow way you build a new life, the creative aspect of it, but also the sheer lonely will. I think of this book as a kind of answer to "The Awakening." That book ends with a woman who gave up everything for romantic love, and killed herself when it didn't work out. This book depicts a woman following her own vision of life, not a familiar romantic one, and the difficulty and necessity of realizing it.

Read this book.

I loved this book. I finished it a few weeks ago and I can't stop thinking about it. The writing is beautiful: strong, intelligent, clean, almost fearless. There's also a gorgeous strength to the main character, Emma, and the writing reflected that strength perfectly. I re-read passages two, three, four times, because I didn't want to leave them behind. Samantha Peale takes us into the New York art world and the details of that world are fascinating. But the story is also very universal in that it allows a glimpse inside that quest for our creative soul and the search for who we are and where we stand in our community. I highly recommend this book for anyone who likes a gripping story and terrific writing.