NAKED UNDER THE LIGHTS

The daughter of a brilliant, selfish painter struggles to find her way in this coming-of-age novel.

Feeling adrift in 1975 with women’s roles in flux, 18-year-old Sonata Kossoff suddenly develops an interest in art and the work of her father, Bert, an abstract painter and instructor at Manhattan’s Art Students League. Unfortunately, Bert, a womanizer who cheats relentlessly on Sonata’s mother, Ruth, and a neglectful dad, doesn’t return the interest. When Sonata asks for art lessons, he’s privately dismissive of her clumsy efforts, and the 50th-birthday party she throws with his colleagues and students turns ugly when he spends the evening at an assignation with Irene, an artist’s model. The fiasco precipitates Ruth’s divorce from Bert, who promptly moves in with Irene and sends Sonata, who veers from idolizing to vilifying him, into the arms of his ex-student Vincent Denfield, whose live-in lover and nude model she becomes. Vincent brusquely evicts Sonata when her muse efforts fail to jump-start his career. She begins a relationship with his businessman brother, Howard, and moves in with Bert and Irene, an awkward arrangement that gets worse when she discovers a dark secret about the death of her younger brother, Billy. Peck, a sculptor and art professor, steeps readers in a sharp-eyed sketch of the art school scene while dissecting the dynamics between artists and the muses who find power in naked subjection. (A model named Agnes “peered at the students from the summit where she stood, as if deciding how much pose the group was entitled to, then lay down and settled into a reclining position.”) The author’s subtle, nuanced prose in this knotty tale explores Sonata’s tensions with a father who can seem monstrously cold—“She wanted to reach up and hug him but stopped herself because they had never actually hugged and he might shrug her off”—but whose obliviousness is the flip side of his absorption in the artistic flow. (“Try to work with some freedom and abandon until you see how the paint flows, how it makes edges, how thin, how thick you can make it,” he tells Sonata in a rare moment of attentiveness.) The result is a complex, moving story about the raptures and haunting price of the creative life.

A rich depiction of the tangled ties of love, art, and family.