Portrait of a complex man

Van Gogh: The Life
By Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith
(Random House)

Vincent van Gogh’s autobiography is painted in luminous, powerful brushstrokes, the supreme portrait of the artist. “As my work is,” he said, “so am I.”

“Van Gogh: The Life,” the intricate and panoramic biography by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, is a provocative work about the volcanic man and his art.

Van Gogh’s story has been romanticized and mythologized, especially in fiction and on film. For decades, his image has been fashioned as much from Irving Stone’s popular novel, “Lust for Life,” and the Oscar-winning 1956 movie starring Kirk Douglas, as it has been from scholars and historians.

As much as any artist, he’s now part of popular culture. He’s everywhere, from posters and address books to song and music, television to Legos, Christmas ornaments to puppets ― including at least one with a detachable ear. There are times when his “Still Life: Vase With Fifteen Sunflowers” seems reproduced almost as often as the face of a certain woman with an enigmatic smile.

Naifeh and Smith treat “the life” with remarkable detail and, despite its imposing length, a very accessible narrative. In that way, it’s similar to their “Jackson Pollock: An American Saga,” for which they earned a Pulitzer Prize. This is an insightful and important work, unquestionably the essential biography for years to come.

There are flaws, of course. Too often, Naifeh and Smith make it seem that great art flowed from the emotion of the moment, going directly from the artist’s immediate state of mind to the canvas. And the book doesn’t fully address van Gogh’s mental condition and spiral into depression.

But, subtly, it does underscore the connection between life and art in a “slow-igniting, fast-burning career.” What matters most is that their van Gogh is alive with the brilliance of cadmium yellow and cobalt blue.

The authors describe his terrible childhood, innumerable failures and humiliations, and the deep loneliness and despair of “such a tormented soul.” Their picture, however, isn’t all sympathy. It’s fuller, also unveiling an abrasive, estranged, manipulative, obsessive, often delusional man.

“Van Gogh: The Life” has gained some notoriety for questioning whether the artist shot himself. Naifeh and Smith speculate that he was killed by a teenager whose ways make him seem a character out of Caravaggio.

“All that can be said with certainty is that he died of a gunshot wound,” they write. “No physical evidence of the shooting was ever produced.” The mythology, however, is that his “Wheat Field With Crows” amounted to a suicide note.

Naifeh and Smith offer a “hypothetical reconstruction” based in part on interviews given by the possible killer, full of “faltering denials” and “boisterous confessions.” While tantalizing, it’s not entirely convincing.

The tragedy and the mystery are partners. What is sure is that van Gogh’s grave is in Auvers, next to his beloved brother Theo’s. The simple, spare stone has his name and years of birth and death. Above are the words, “Ici Repose” ― here rests.

After reading the tumultuous “Van Gogh: The Life,” you’ll think it’s the only time he ever did (MCT)


The game is afoot, in homage with heft

The House of Silk
By Anthony Horowitz
(Mulholland Books)

Sherlock Holmes will never die ― no generation of writers would let him.

Someone will always lovingly gather the classic pieces ― Dr. John Watson, the Baker Street Irregulars, Holmes’ smarter brother Mycroft, even the cocaine use ― and reassemble them.

Generally, whether it’s a novel, a movie or a TV series, it’s either a homage to the much-loved stories, or a reimagining that takes the familiar elements into new and often darker places. Michael Dibdin’s “The Last Sherlock Holmes Story,” which added Jack the Ripper to the mix, might be the most extreme case of a reimagining.

“The House of Silk” reads for most of its length like a homage. It’s enormously involving and entertaining, and even funny in parts: Kindly Watson describes Scotland Yard’s hapless Inspector Lestrade as having “the general demeanour of a rat who has been obliged to dress up for lunch at the Savoy.”

But for large chunks of the novel, set in 1890, the reader wonders what the purpose of the new adventure is. It works just fine as a spirited Holmesian thriller, but could use more literary ambition. By the end, though, the novel shows itself to be something more. So enjoy the ride, and be assured it’s going somewhere.

“The House of Silk” is presented as a Holmes story too disturbing for Watson to publish in his lifetime. Aging, and suffering from an old war wound, as a new “terrible and senseless war rages on the Continent,” Watson plans to instruct that the tale be embargoed for 100 years. “It is impossible to imagine what the world will be like then . . . but perhaps future readers will be more inured to scandal and corruption than my own would have been.”

A big challenge for Horowitz is juggling two separate inquiries with bewildering links to each other.

The first one begins when Edmund Carstairs, a fine-art dealer from Wimbledon who feels menaced by a man in a flat cap who he believes has followed him from America, engages Holmes to investigate. Carstairs had been the accidental victim of a train robbery in Massachusetts that led in the ensuing weeks to half a dozen killings.

The second inquiry begins when young Ross, one of the Baker Street Irregulars, is found beaten to death, his throat cut and a white silk ribbon knotted around his wrist.

An uncharacteristically shaken Holmes tells Watson: “Wiggins, Ross and the rest of were nothing to me, just as they are nothing to the society that has abandoned them to the streets, and it never occurred to me that this horror might be the result of my actions. Would I have allowed a young boy to stand alone outside a hotel in the darkness had it been your son or mine?”

Holmes and Watson learn that the House of Silk “is a criminal enterprise that operates on a massive scale and ... has friends in the very highest places.” It’s also, as Holmes tells Carstairs at the end, “a crime more unpleasant than any I had ever encountered.” (MCT)