The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson
Review by Claire Thomson
Charlotte Mendelson’s latest novel seeks to answer the question Linda Nochlin posed over fifty years ago: why have there been no great women artists? The answer in this immensely readable novel, long listed for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, is personified by one man, the abusive and arrogant Ray Hanrahan.
Ray Hanrahan is a perhaps moderately important artist who has not exhibited in some time. He lives in a sprawling north London home with his wife Lucia, an artist, their daughter Leah, and Patrick, Lucia’s son from a previous relationship. Their daughter Jess has moved to Edinburgh where she lives with her partner Martin.
The family congregates in London as Ray prepares to stage his much anticipated first exhibition in some time. While Lucia braces herself to support Ray and the extreme emotions he tends to display around a new exhibition, she herself is offered a once in a lifetime opportunity she knows Ray will resent her for forever.
Every scene in this artistic family saga is fraught with the specific tension of domestic chaos. Mendelson portrays the claustrophobia and discomfort this very particular kind of upper middle class squalor creates: the picture frames stacked double against dusty skirting boards; congealing tangerine peels on the table; the central heating always on full blast with scant thought to the cost.
The dark reality lying behind the dirt and the chaos is Ray’s abuse. His family stop short of calling his appalling behaviour what it is, but he is extraordinarily controlling and jealous of his wife’s well earned success and cruel to his stepson. He has an unhealthily doting relationship with one of his daughters. His other daughter has escaped this chaos, and watches in disbelief as her Scottish boyfriend becomes deeply enamoured with this London privilege in all of its horrors.
Mendelson uses the form of the exhibition well. The shifting perspectives between family members invites us to observe a different snapshot of life, and, crucially, of Ray. We see his monstrous behaviour from different angles and prejudices, never quite sure who to believe. Each of the characters is engaged in a kind of hermeneutics with their own father: how should they interpret his behaviour and his work, what do they mean, and are the man and his work one and the same? The insights of each of his family members create a kind of caption, affixed underneath a snapshot of Ray.
If there’s a downside to this structure, it’s that it can feel at times as though it’s a struggle for the vast array of characters to be fully developed. This is especially the case with Priya, a rising star in the House of Commons who captures Lucia’s attention and threatens to derail her toxic marriage even further.
At points, the members of this dysfunctional family feel unbelievable. Ray’s awfulness and Lucia’s submissiveness are almost caricaturish. But this plays to the novel’s strengths. Mendelson invites us to question if people, if a marriage, could be this bad, and confronts us with the reality that it is.
Feeling terror before joy at personal success, literally tip-toeing around your own house and being unable to protect your children from treatment they do not deserve is the reality of life in too many abusive marriages. And putting your husband’s success before your own was the reality of too many women artists.
This isn’t a novel interested in exploring the feminist argument for the deconstruction of the category of the singular ‘artist’ — exclusive as that category often is of questions of influence and community. Nor is it concerned with unpacking the structures of the artworld which have, hitherto, valorised the difficult behaviour of ‘genius’ men and oppressed the talents of so many women.
But it explores what it does extremely well — the difficulty of creating anything as a woman while existing in the stifling traditions of middle class domesticity. And it’s toxic and violent domesticity rather than creativity that dominates these characters’ lives. Mendelson exposes Ray’s façade of bohemianism brilliantly. His moods, his whims and his very artistry can only exist because Lucia has sacrificed her own in the name of his work.
In Jackson Pollock’s 1950 conversation with William Wright, he says: “The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion and other inner forces.” Though taken out of context here, Ray operates under a similar illusion to Pollock’s. Ray operates under a similar illusion. The outside forces that keep the lights on and the children fed are not of his concern.
The extent of Ray Hanrahan’s actual genius is teased throughout, leading to a hugely satisfying ending that serves to reveal the lack of substance behind Ray’s toxic masculinity and his chilling control over his family. Perhaps the family has been oppressed and ruled over by an idea of a man, or an imitation, rather than the man himself. But it’s an idea of a man that has heart-breaking and lasting consequences for the family who have spent decades worshiping at its altar.