Trompe L’Oeil (i.e., Optical Illusion), by Nancy Reisman, is an exquisite emotional and literary portrait of a family. The plot follows the lives of the Murphy family over the course of approximately thirty-five years. There’s James, the father; Nora, the mother; Theo, the oldest child and only son; Katy, the second child; Molly, the child who was killed in a pedestrian accident when she was four years old; and eventually, Sara and Dalia, two daughters born in quick succession after Molly’s death. The Murphys are an affluent, educated, and artistic New England family with ties to Boston, Cambridge, Wellesley, and Cape Cod. By all intents and purposes, they’re an ordinary privileged family made unique by having been forced to weather the extraordinary crisis of a child’s death.
At the beginning of the book, seemingly at the peak of the family’s happiness and vigor, Molly is tragically run over and killed by a truck while dashing across a street in Rome during a family vacation. She was only four years old. In an instant, the illusion of the family’s perfect life and expected future vanishes. Can one event change everything? Can one tragic event propel every individual in the family—both existing and not yet born—on to another trajectory? Can it keep affecting each life repeatedly and endlessly into the future?
If you read this elegant and sublime novel, you’ll come away answering, “Why, yes, of course!” The novel will help you understand and experience all the subtle ways that this can be true.
If there is a purpose or theme to this novel, it seems to be a demonstration that we are all in a state of perpetual transition; that life is an illusion that never stands still; that the “world as one knows it is only the world of a moment.”
This novel is told in the past tense by an anonymous narrator. At first, I thought the narrator was the author and that I would be reading a typical third-person omniscient narration. But that didn’t happen. And I was confused. And to add to the confusion, the author keep interjecting random strange chapters into the novel, each focusing on a very detailed physical and emotional description of different famous works of art. These short art chapters (there are 13 of them in a novel with a total of 76 chapters)—see the list of the art works at the end of this review—were narrated in the second person, i.e., using “you” as the voice. They exist, perhaps as a literary device, to pull the reader intimately into the novel, to make us believe that we are the ones doing the observing of each artwork…and then, by projection, that we are the fly-on-the-wall voyeurs, intimately peeking in on the lives of the Murphy family.
The primary narrator is never conclusively revealed. It could be the author or one of the characters in the novel. If so, it is no doubt Nora, because she emerges as the book’s main character and is the one most interested in art. Regardless, the narrator is human, not God-like. The narrator infers all human thought and emotions. The narrator is a keen analytical observer of life, nothing more. In some ways, the narrator is like a person in an art gallery. The narrator studies each scene in the lives of this family just like a visitor to an art gallery might stand in front of a painting and study it carefully, trying to infer all knowledge that can be inferred from the slightest clue.
This is an emotionally rich and meditative novel. The imagery is as precise and expressive as any of the famous works of art described in the thirteen art chapters. A great deal of care was taken in choosing exactly how each scene is described. Every word has purpose and weight.
This is an exquisite novel of subtle beauty and abundant depth. If it were a reading assignment in an advanced contemporary American literature seminar, I could think of any number of major concepts contained within it that easily could lend themselves to academic analysis.
As promised, here is a list of the famous works of art that are described in detail within this book. I suggest that you do an Internet image search on each work and have it in front of you, to study, while you read each of these chapters. Doing this will significantly increase your reading pleasure. It will also help pull you inside the story, inside the lives of these characters, so you become that analytical and empathetic “fly-on-the-wall voyeur” that the author want you to become. If there is any connection between these works of art and the story within the novel, it is that the main character, Nora, keeps a beloved shoebox full of museum gallery postcards of famous works of art just like these. She takes the box out and studies her art treasure photos whenever she needs quiet time by herself to recharge her emotional strength.
• Rome: Prospettiva, Franscesco Borromini (c. 1652-53), Palazzo Spada
• Rome: Maddalena Penitente, Domenico Fetti (early 17th century), Galleria Doria Pamphilj
• Rome: La Maddalena, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1594-95), Galleria Doria Pamphilj
• Rome: The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (c. 1647-52), Chiesa Di Santa Maria Della Vittoria
• Rome: Annunciazione, Fra Filippo Lippi (15th century), Galleria Doria Pamphilj
• Reproduction: The Magdalen Reading, Rogier van der Weyden (before 1438), National Gallery, London
• Rome: Pauline Bonaparte, Antonio Canova (early 19th century), Galleria Borghese
• Reproduction: Interior: Woman before a Window, Edouard Vuillard (c 1900), From a private collection
• Reproduction: Magdalena Poenitens (Penitent Magdalen), Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum after Pieter Brugel the Elder (1555-56), Etching with engraving
• Reproduction: Magdalen Reading, Follower of Piero de Cosimo (1500-20), Courtauld Gallery, London
• Rome: Apollo and Daphne, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (c. 1622-25), Galleria Borghese
• Reproduction: Interior with Pink Wallpaper I, plate five, Edouard Vuillard (1899), Art Institute of Chicago
• Rome: La Dama con Liocorno, Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (1506), Galleria Borghese
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