Harriet picks each of her men with great purpose. Each male “mask” shows one piece of Harriet’s meisterstück triptych. Eldridge, a mixed-race drag performer and the “villain” of the piece, conceptual artist and darling of the art world, Rune.
The triad of conspirators with whom she works is fairly varied: there’s Anton Tish, a neophyte on the arts circuit Phineas Q. ‘Maskings’ is part experiment, part certainty: Burden wants to test (but is already convinced of) the fact of her work as better received by the demi-monde if its authorship is attributed to men, rather than to a woman.
In this, she puts up three exhibitions of her own work, but pitches her creations as the output of three different male artists. Harriet chooses three different men with whom to “collaborate” on creating a series of works called ‘Maskings’. Still ignored in her 60s, and “mad with vengeance,” she decides to propagate an elaborate scheme to claim what she sees as her due. Her work has been - she is convinced - ignored by the darlings of the New York art scene for no good reason other than her gender, and in The Blazing World, we are introduced to the story of how she is determined to right this wrong.
Harriet Burden, the protagonist of The Blazing World, is an overlooked artist, the wife of a prominent art-dealer in New York. But there’s one thing that you should believe: despite picking up some of the driest, most archetypically convoluted bits of work from the world of academia, Hustvedt has crafted a novel that is mind-boggling in its pace, speed and plot. Psychoanalysis? Like you wouldn’t believe. I’m not one of them though, and while The Blazing World engenders an odd combination of rage and paralytic self-doubt, it manages to tick almost every box that makes a novel enjoyable for me. This isn’t meant to be a back-handed compliment, and it’s entirely possible that many highly erudite people will read the book and sit back with a shrug, thinking to themselves “Well, that’s just really basic.” Longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker prize, Siri Hustvedt’s sixth novel inspires nothing quite so much as a feeling of inadequacy. HONESTLY, I don’t even know where to begin with The Blazing World.
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