About.com Rating

Random House, 2014

Robin Black's Life Drawing is a tragic novel about a creative couple who quit the big city, whose temptations resulted in infidelity, and move to a remote and lonely town to live a while with without distraction. Augusta retreats to the studio to paint daily while Owen converts their barn into a writing studio. They live in relative happiness, Owen forgiving Augusta's discretion with the promise that they will keep open the lines of communication between them.

And so it goes, until an unexpected woman, Alison, moves in to the dilapidated house next door - the only other house on the street. Her short-term rental turns into a long stay, and Augusta and Alison become close, cautiously at first. Alison enjoys the company of another woman, and the two ladies take walks around the lake, visit the farmer's market, and regularly have dinner together. Augusta learns that Alison is escaping an abusive husband and trying to let go of the past and start over. Owen, however, is not in the best place. Not only is he upset about the intrusion, but he is experiencing crippling writer's block, unable to put to paper anything worth reading.

Augusta, on the other hand, is enjoying a productive creative output. After redoing the hall bathroom, She and Owen find old newspapers in the walls, used for insulation. Augusta becomes attached to the faces on the pages, young boys who died in World War I. She begins a series of paintings of these boys in their uniforms standing throughout her house - soldiers in the kitchen, living room, and on the porch.

She contemplates her "desire to communicate" through her art. She considers painting to be the medium through which she presents facts, observation, albeit colored with her own opinions, which is why abstract art is so elusive to her. Yet, drawing people has never been in her wheelhouse, which makes her current undertaking so difficult to complete. The drive to portray these boys, because they were just boys when they died, becomes all-consuming.

Perhaps her inability to draw people is reflective of something deeper within - an unwillingness to connect to people, her tendency to hold people off at an arm's length after dealing with the inability to reproduce, the death of her mother and sister at a young age, the depleting health of her father, and her rendezvous with another man.

What Owen doesn't know is that Augusta is still in contact with her ex-lover's daughter, a former painting apprentice under her tutelage. When the girl starts e-mailing Augusta again, it only serves to make things more tense, compounding the depressive creative block that Owen is going through. Apparently, forgiving and forgetting will take more work than simply running to the country. No amount of space or time will dissipate the hurt and betrayal, especially with Owen feeling so helpless at the moment.

"There are often two conversations going on in a marriage. The one that you're having and the one you're not. Sometimes you don't even know when that second, silent one has begun."

Life Drawing is impossible to put down. Although the entire story is written in retrospect and the reader knows what happens to the protagonists from page one, the ending is still completely shocking and heartbreaking. It is wonderfully written tale about the intricacies of marriage, pulling down the veil of happiness and exposing the darker side. It's a book that will remain with you for weeks, and you'll find yourself recommending it to friends over and over again.

Robin Black published her short story collection, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This in 2010; her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Freight Stories, Colorado Review and The Southern Review.