The Marriage Artist » (First Edition)

Andrew Winer is the author of The Marriage Artist and The Color Midnight Made. Formerly an artist who wrote art criticism, he teaches at the University of California, Riverside, where he has directed the MFA program in creative writing. He is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction and is married to the writer Charmaine Craig, with whom he has two daughters.

Two mysterious deaths unlock one man's past and another's future in this moving tale of art, love, and history

When the wife of renowned art critic Daniel Lichtmann plunges to her death, she is not alone. Lying next to her is her suspected lover, Benjamin Wind, the very artist Daniel most championed. Tormented by questions about the circumstances of their deaths, Daniel dedicates himself to uncovering the secrets of their relationship and the inspiration behind Wind's dazzling final exhibition.

What Daniel discovers is a web of mysteries leading back to pre-World War II Vienna and the magnificent life of Josef Pick, a forgotten artist who may have been the twentieth century's greatest painter of love. But the most astonishing discoveryis what connects these two artists acrosshalf a century: a remarkable woman whose response to the tragedy of her generation offers Daniel answers to the questions he never knew to ask.

Ambitious, haunting, and stunningly written, The Marriage Artist tells a universal tale of a family dramatically reshaped by the quest for personal freedom in the face of inherited beliefs, public prejudices, and the unfathomable turns of history. It is at once a provocative snapshot of contemporary marriage, the recovery of a passion that history never recorded, and a fierce reminder of the way we enlist love in our perpetual search for meaning and permanence.

Publishers Weekly

Winer's powerful and ambitious second novel (after The Color Midnight Made) is nothing less than an attempt to unearth the essence and meaning of life passed on by those who survived the Holocaust. The double suicide of art critic Daniel Lichtmann's wife and her artist lover, Benjamin Wind, whose art Daniel has championed, compels Daniel to find out what caused the two to jump from Benjamin's studio window. Daniel discovers that Benjamin's family were not Blackfoot Indians, as Benjamin had been led to believe by his embittered father, but Austrian Jews, and his grandfather, Josef Weiner, created staggeringly beautiful ketubot (Jewish marriage contracts) that earned him fame in prewar Vienna but were also responsible for his downfall. Daniel learns of the family's horrific experiences at the hands of the Nazis while trying to piece together the reasons his wife's life ended on a sidewalk next to an artist whose family tragedies are so strangely hidden. Though questions remain unanswered, Winer packs the story with intriguing ideas and metaphors so movingly articulated that it's easy to forgive him for sometimes forgetting to plug a few holes in his audacious plot. (Nov.)