THE COMPASS ROSE

Artistic works of the old masters illuminate stories of crime, family feuds, and acrid relationships in Barasch Rubinstein’s knotty stories.

The author prefaces each of these four tales with brief, scholarly pieces about Italian Renaissance artists, each hinting at the following story’s themes. In “On Perspective,” 14th-century painter Giotto’s innovations in perspective frame a narrative about a restaurant owner who hires a prisoner on work-release and is excited by the man’s accounts of his burglaries—until some money goes missing. “On Motion” pairs Leonardo da Vinci’s treatment of movement with a couple traveling around the world by train and plane, stewing in jealousy and the man’s resentment at being left out of his father’s will. “On Time” cites Michelangelo’s works to comment on a woman’s reconnection with an old flame who dredges up anguished recollections of her abortion and their breakup. “On Synthesis” moves from Raphael’s harmonious balancing of motifs to a woman whose sense of empathy sharpens as she writes a story about a painter and advises people on their conflicting desires for love and meaning. Barasch Rubinstein’s lucid, engaging art-history sections, which are illustrated by color reproductions of various masterpieces, establish an intellectual tone that bleeds into her fiction as her characters self-consciously brood over moral and epistemic conundrums. There’s much neurotic navel-gazing in the stories, and characters tend to sound like psychiatrists when they speak, as when the narrator of “On Synthesis” says, “Your search for the truth is a result of your curiosity. The child that didn’t want to find out what his father was doing preferred not to delve into human nature.” Fortunately, Barasch Rubinstein excels at visual, painterly imagery that opens up her characters’ inner worlds, as in “On Time”: “A hidden joy was forming, splashing golden slivers everywhere, illuminating the suffering, making it look almost attractive.” The result is a gallery of shrewdly drawn, deeply felt portraits.

Occasionally stilted but often luminous literary studies in which life imitates art.