Narrative Dreaming in Leesa Cross-Smith’s “Half-Blown Rose” https://ift.tt/ceOjvLl
Leesa Cross-Smith’s novel Half-Blown Rose looks closely at a woman whose life is upended at the very point in time that she might be settling into early middle age. At forty-four, Vincent, an artist, discovers that as a very young man, her husband, Cillian, had a secret child, which he abandoned in Dublin before moving to the United States. This betrayal is all the more wounding because its discovery comes in the form of a semi-autobiographical novel that becomes a bestseller. What follows is a story about the intersection between love and art. Half-Blown Rose explores questions about loyalty, truth, and what one owes oneself.
The book starts with Vincent having fled to Paris. In a brief section written as stage direction, she is standing in an art museum watching her twenty-something student Loup put away his art supplies. Shifting into a narrative, Vincent describes Loup “who smells like summer and dark green, reminding her of Kentucky forests back home.” Thus begins the multi-modal story that uses excerpts from Cillian’s novel, playlists, and journal entries to accompany Vincent’s journey through Paris and beyond. The result is a nuanced story that has a carefully calibrated tone that takes in all of Vincent’s moods as she grapples with the sadness in her marriage and the excitement of a new attraction.
Cross-Smith is a master of depicting the fictional world through Vincent’s artistic eyes, which are alive to the color and sensation around her. Everything is rendered in vivid detail from the clothing worn by Vincent and her Parisian friends to the onset of her menses, which provides a momentarily awkward situation with Loup and a signpost for the story that follows. Cross-Smith never fails to ground the reader firmly in Vincent’s body:
Next, Loup, smiling walks onto the stage and looks out at the crowd.
He raises both arms, crosses them, uncrosses them. When he’s under
the lights, Vincent can see he is wearing a loose, pale T-shirt with Van
Gogh’s Sunflowers on it. Baptiste bends to say ouais in Vincent’s ear
And she feels like she has jumped from something high up and she is
still falling.
Half-Blown Rose is infused with literary illusions, some of which match the narrative and others that seem a bit showy or off the mark. There are references to the work of the Bronte Sisters, Gustav Klimt, the Bible, and French New Wave cinema. The book’s central metaphor, the half-blown rose, was well selected to match the “blooming and becoming” that Vincent experiences as she navigates the complex relationships in her life.
Vincent and Loup embark on a relationship, even as she struggles with feelings of affection and anger for her estranged husband, Cillian. The focus on sensation and the well-written sex scenes put this novel at the delicious intersection between literary fiction and the best of romance writing. The novel always achieves this with smart, self-determined Vincent giving herself the time and space to decide what she needs at that time and how she might forge a future in which her desires are fully realized.
Vincent operates in a liminal space while in Paris and traveling through Europe. The novel has a lovely relaxed, spacious feeling, even while Vincent’s eventual reunion with her estranged husband looms. Vincent and Cillian are set to reunite at their son’s wedding and Cross-Smith avoids the pressure to rush the ending. What she offers instead is an extension of a narrative dream and an ending that, while stagey, refuses to foreclose any of Vincent’s options.
Half-Blown Rose is an interesting collage of forms and an artistic creation of its own. Ultimately, it tells the story of how love and art can both clash and illuminate.
FICTION Half-Blown Rose
By Leesa Cross-Smith
Grand Central Publishing
Originally Published May 31st, 2022
Paperback Published April 18th, 2023
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