A promising first novel from a writer to watch

By Sara Houghteling

Knopf. 253 pp. $24.95

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Reviewed by David Walton

The pleasures of a good first novel are often in the future rather than the present tense. In its flaws as well as its achievements, we see the promise of an outstanding third or fourth novel. Sara Houghteling's

Pictures at an Exhibition

is this future-tense kind of novel. Focused on the theft of private art during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II, it is everything a first novel both should and ought not to be.

It does not seem to be autobiographical, is not about the writing of itself, and is not more than 300 pages.

It has a definite theme and a fascinating subject: the wartime disappearance of paintings and precious art objects, many, many thousands of which have never been recovered.

Set just before and just after the war, the novel effectively evokes time, place, and situation. The Paris streets and cafes, the names of the different art galleries and dealers, the artwork that passed through their hands - Houghteling has clearly done her homework, and the passage of period detail into the novel's narrative stream is graceful, persuasive, and never intrusive. The details - whether the contents of Matisse's studio or the packing and transporting of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, a third-century B.C. Greek sculpture, from the Louvre in 1940 - ring true.

The narrator, Daniel Berenson, is the son of one of Paris' leading dealers, but his father denies him entry into the business because he lacks "the memory, the business acumen, the ruthlessness, and the lucidity of vision to predict what could be bought one spring and sold a dozen Junes hence."

Resenting his father's verdict, Daniel indifferently pursues medical studies while pining for his father's assistant, Rose Clément, a character based on the real-life Rose Valland, a Louvre curator who kept secret records of the routing and destination of many of the artworks stolen by the Nazis, and who managed to stay on at the museum well after many of the French staff members had been forced out.

Houghteling's is the kind of lean, atmospheric novel that makes an excellent film script. Paris, even under the Germans, is storybook wonderful, and an unending display of great art marches through these pages.

The plot is Daniel's quest to prove himself to his father, to win Rose's love, and to uncover a family secret. It's engaging, but it is not the novel's chief interest. As the title suggests, the novel "exhibits," through Daniel's quest to recover his family's lost paintings, a succession of dramatically charged images, or tableaux. A small example: It's well known that the Nazis systematically robbed French Jews of the valuable artworks they owned, but in truth they stole everything - furniture, fixtures, shipping everything of value back to Germany. After the war some was recovered, but it was impossible to sort out ownership.

Houghteling is very good at formulating such historic facts into set pieces, small scenes or set descriptions that encapsulate the ironies and sufferings of history. The wife of a former Paris gallery owner, who has suffered the degradation of Nazi robbery, gives the following lament as she describes her apartment to Daniel: "The apartment is filled with furniture. Yet, aside from the stoves and bathtubs, none of it is ours. Neither the kitchen cabinets, nor the forks, nor the linens. Not the bedposts, not the prints of India, not even the doorknobs."

Pictures at an Exhibition is a very good first novel, very accomplished, but somehow not as dramatic or emotionally fulfilling as you'd expect. Yet Houghteling is a writer to watch, one whose next or third book will deliver all the power and satisfaction this book promises.