Alex Miller - The Sitters

Australian author Alex Miller has written about painting and painters a number of times. The protagonist of The Sitters has for some time found it impossible to paint, but his sudden fascination with academic Jessica Keal inspires him to try his hand once more. This brief novella takes the form of a retrospective analysis of his rediscovery of art. He writes, "And that is what she gave me, Jessica Keal, the subject of this altered memory, a memory entangled with certain family likenesses and forgotten moments of my childhood; her roots and mine mysteriously grown together".

Early on in the novella, the protagonist recounts a series of outings his family took together to "some out-of-the-way village in Kent" where his family would find some quiet spot of nature and spend time together. His father brought with them some paints, and father and son would paint quiet landscapes together, comfortable in their art and secure in their relationship. This all, however, is a lie, with the narrator admitting he made up the story within a page of telling it. He admits to lying as it suits and even when it does not, which puts an uncertain and uncomfortable slant on the following story of himself and Jessica. From the first, we have become explicitly aware that our narrator is not to be trusted. What, then, can we conclude as true from his story?

The protagonist is a sad and lonely man. He has money enough thanks to early success with his painting, but he has done nothing critically significant in years, and nothing personally significant in longer. He tells his story in short sections devoid of chapter headings or titles, and even, often, absent of dialogue. Events unfold and he meets Jessica Keal at a university function, and then properly after being contracted to paint ten small portraits, but then he unbalances them both by suggesting a significant series of portraits that will, in his words, take months, and possibly as long as two years. He senses a connection between himself and Jessica, but the concrete interactions of the two are ambiguous enough that it could all be in his head.

The painter recounts his past in detail and, as Jessica reveals small portions of her own, he goes to great lengths to link them together. It is clear that he wishes to forge a connection between himself and Jessica, and it seems that she is willing to go along with him - but only so far. The painter is a sensualist, but his sensuality exists purely for himself, and only in his mind. He is attracted to Jessica as an ikon of his returning ability to paint, not necessarily as a woman - for all that she has smooth limbs and a fair face. The painter is able to have a sensitive conversation with himself, but his ability to share emotionally with another is lacking. Hence Jessica remains off-balance throughout the story, fidgeting and uncomfortable.

For a man able to draw and paint so well, the lines of his family and friends are blurred and unclear. In a novella only 131 pages long, devoting more than twenty or thirty on his family is quite significant - yet even more significant is the fact that they remain mostly intangible. Only the painter himself has any clarity to his status as an individual. The rest are used as springboards for the painter to expound upon whatever subject interests him, and these opinions are almost always negative, and they are always - always - easily reducible to being seen as the painter commenting directly on himself. He wonders, "We know there's always someone listening for an echo of themselves in everything we say. There's always someone reading our thoughts over our shoulder as we write them down". What Miller is doing, in effect, is commenting less on the painter relearning how to paint, as the solitary creative artist struggling with himself. The trappings are of painters and male/female sexual tension, but the core of the matter is the yawning chasm that opens up inside a person who chooses - chooses, mind - to spend the vast majority of their lives alone, listening to the echo chamber of their heart and mind.

Generally the scenes between Jessica and the painter are written in present-tense, while the rest - and this includes other scenes between characters which is arguably existing along the same time frame as the portraits are being painted - are in past tense. This adds a level of focus and intensity to their meetings, and is a solid choice on the author's part. It is important for the reader to properly explore the painter's mind, and the use of present tense during these critical scenes is an effective way to ensure this occurs. What is less effective, however, are the constant use of short, sharp sentences. Such sentence-based jabs create a sense of mounting tension and excitement that directly contravenes the mood the author is creating. Paragraphs composed of short sentences are best used in the pursuit of action of extreme duress, not calm meditation on creativity and painting.

Nonetheless, this is an assured work of literature. As a novella, the theme and perspective are well-chosen. A similar theme was used less effectively for Miller's later novel, Prochownik's Dream, which stretched the plot to an unnecessary 299 pages. The Sitters is his third novel, written three years after his Miles Franklin Literary Award winning, The Ancestor Game, and thirteen years before his 2005 novel, Prochownik's Dream. There are flaws, yes, but the overall work is solid and well worth the read.

Author	Alex Miller
Title	The Sitters
Nationality	Australian
Publisher	Allen & Unwin
Published	1995 (English)
Pages	131
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