French Girl with Mother

The protagonist of Ollestad’s ambitious but flawed novel (following his 2009 memoir, Crazy for the Storm) is a struggling artist dabbling in danger for the sake of his art. Once hailed by the famous painter Ed Ruscha, Nathan Woods is now adrift in Paris; an old mentor back home told him, after bland reviews of his latest show, that he had “too much college and not enough life.” Roaming the streets looking for inspiration, Nathan meets Anais, a volatile young French woman, and agrees to follow her to her family’s chateau. There they begin a fraught erotic relationship, which ignites Nathan’s creative juices. He begins to sketch her. When Anais’s mother and father arrive at the chateau, Nathan senses that things are going to get weird. And they do. The whole family keeps secrets: erotic secrets, as well as business secrets, and they inflict pain on one another in a way that both repulses Nathan and invigorates his work. In addition, Anais’s father and an uncle in the chateau next door are involved in smuggling works of art to the Middle East, and when the FBI shows up with an ultimatum, Nathan is caught up in a scheme that has him skiing over the Alps with a couple of Egon Schiele paintings, threatening his career and his life. Ollestad tries to plumb the depths of art and the nature of inspiration, and he attempts to describe a great deal of sexual congress in emotional, affecting terms, but with little success. (Oct.)