TITLE: A Spectral Hue
AUTHOR: Craig L. Gidney
215 pages, Word Horde, ISBN 9781939905505 (paperback, also available in e-book)
DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): For generations, the marsh-surrounded town of Shimmer, Maryland has played host to a loose movement of African-American artists, all working in different media, but all utilizing the same haunting color. Landscape paintings, trompe l'oeil quilts, decorated dolls, mixed-media assemblages, and more, all featuring the same peculiar hue, a shifting pigment somewhere between purple and pink, the color of the saltmarsh orchid, a rare and indigenous flower.
Graduate student Xavier Wentworth has been drawn to Shimmer, hoping to study the work of artists like quilter Hazel Whitby and landscape painter Shadrach Grayson in detail, having experienced something akin to an epiphany when viewing a Hazel Whitby tapestry as a child. Xavier will find that others, too, have been drawn to Shimmer, called by something more than art, something in the marsh itself, a mysterious, spectral hue.
From Lambda Literary Award-nominated author Craig Laurance Gidney (Sea, Swallow Me & Other Stories, Skin Deep Magic) comes A Spectral Hue, a novel of art, obsession, and the ghosts that haunt us all.
MY RATING: 5 out of 5 stars
MY THOUGHTS: Craig L. Gidney’s A Spectral Hue is a beautifully written novel told from multiple points of view that gives readers time to ruminate on the nature of art and art criticism and the influence both exert over artists and audiences. It’s a slow-burn in the very best ways a story can be. I loved the slow reveal of characters’ pasts and motivations and connections and I didn’t really want the book to end.
A Spectral Hue is told mostly told through the eyes of art history student Xavier Wentworth but also through the points of view of Shimmer resident Iris and museum security guard Lincoln. Each has their own personal and complicated relationship to the art created in Shimmer based partly on their individual pasts and the support they did or didn’t receive from parents and/or siblings. Gidney parcels these histories out (sometimes in internal monologue style, often in clearly defined flashbacks) in tantalizing portions that incrementally build towards a shared connection in which the artists become the art. It’s story-architecture as art, skillfully built so that don’t see the technical underpinnings but feel them all the same.
But in addition to the human characters, there is the mystery of the being who inspires the art to be created – the swamp-dwelling entity personified by the purple-pink pigment of the salt-marsh orchid. There is no doubt from the very beginning of the novel that there is something supernatural going on in the town of Shimmer, something only certain people (people with an artistic bent, whether they recognize it in themselves or not) can see or are affected by. Xavier, Link, and Iris are only the latest in that long line, and Gidney shows us how the influence and movement started by flashing back to the early life of a slave girl named Hazel, the same Hazel Whitby whose art Xavier came to town to study. We meet the spirit entity who calls herself Fuchsia before we meet any of the modern characters, and we begin to see her influence on young Hazel about a quarter of the way through the narrative – but we don’t learn exactly what Fuchsia is until near the end of the novel, and the reveal is worth the wait.
Throughout the novel, Gidney shows us how art can be a prison as much as an escape and how muses can be dominators as much as liberators. All the characters whose art is collected in the Whitby-Grayson museum, and several townsfolk whose art is kept private, experience a sense of stepping from everyday life while they are in the midst of creation – but over time many become obsessed with the creative act to the detriment of meeting their own daily needs for survival. The art traps them in deteriorating minds and bodies. Fuchsia is formless, bodyless muse – but her inspiration moves into the realm of mental, and occasionally physical, dominance, almost forcing these artists to give her what she needs. And Fuchsia herself feels trapped in her role and in a world she should have shifted away from long ago. Many of the moments where it is obvious the artists have lost control of themselves, given themselves over to their inspiration, are uncomfortable.
Art, especially created by those from marginalized or minimalized communities, can be uncomfortable to view, to interact with, to experience, especially for those audience members who come from outside the community (whether because of an interest to learn or to gawk and leer). The art created by the Shimmer movement artists has that effect: tapestries and paintings seem to undulate in the corner of a viewer’s eye, bringing on nausea or dizziness or even fainting spells; dolls seem to be watching or moving even when they’re not. The art in the story matches the art of the story -- there are lots of unnerving scenes, some visceral and some physical, some sensual and some emotional.
One particularly eye-opening moment for me touches on the way museum docents/curators can foster an atmosphere of gatekeeping. What is allowed to be displayed, what is worthy of study/analysis: The clinical approach of the white, college-educated curator of the Whitby-Grayson Museum contrasts with the emotional approach of the black, previously nomadic janitor. The curator’s condescending attitude towards his hired menial staff and the art and artists represented also contrasts with his reaction to the college art history student.
The test, for both the characters in the book and for readers of it, is whether they are willing to work through the discomfort to hear what the artist is saying. A Spectral Hue’s discomfiting moments are worth experiencing to get to the heart and beauty of a story about art forging connections between people who otherwise might never have met and artists’ dichotomous relationship with the art they create.