Many of Kurt Vonnegut’s later novels have a hook to them, an obvious subject that isn’t quite what they’re about. Jailbird deals with Watergate, but it’s not really about Watergate. Deadeye Dick deals with gun tragedies, but isn’t just about guns. And Bluebeard deals with Abstract Expressionist painting, but has a lot more on its mind.
Published in 1987, like many of Vonnegut’s later novels Bluebeard is written in the form of a memoir; specifically, the memoir of Rabo Karabekian, who aspired to be a painter in his youth, lived an unpredictable life, and in the late-1980s has settled into retirement. A widower twice over who owns the world’s foremost collection of Abstract Expressionist paintings, as the book opens he’s started writing his autobiography and has met a young woman named Circe Berman on the beach of his Long Island estate.
There’s no question of romance, but Circe ends up moving in to Rabo’s home and taking it over. Their relationship, a mix of friendship and mutual exasperation, alternates with Rabo’s stories of his Armenian family fleeing genocide during World War I, and then Rabo’s recollections of his long life including his attempts to learn art from a master illustrator, his friendship with Abstract Expressionist painters real and fictional, and his failures in his own attempt to become a painter.
The novel’s title comes from a potato barn on Rabo’s property that he refuses to allow anyone else to enter, especially Circe. Circe otherwise turns his life upside down, at one point manipulating him into leaving his home so she can redecorate. Given that Rabo lost an eye in the Second World War, you can’t help but notice that the book opens with Circe and a cyclops (as Rabo refers to himself); but if he’s a monster and she’s a witch, neither really fit those roles.
Bluebeard is a complex book about complex characters. Even the pattern of event is complex, with minor characters turning up at unexpected points, as though Vonnegut was determined to get as much use as possible out of them. The book’s a comedy that grapples with serious themes, and the density of connections between characters provokes delight, laughter, and thoughtfulness; those unpredictable links complicate the book’s ideas.
And it’s a book of ideas. It’s about many things, including gender roles; about women, who Vonnegut himself said were too often minimized in his fiction. One of Rabo’s romantic interests, a survivor of domestic violence, ends up creating a community after World War II of women damaged by war and male violence. And the painting that Rabo inevitably creates as an attempt at a life’s work implicitly responds to that and to war as a whole.
Mainly, the book’s about art, including writing. Questions arise as to the value of art, and of abstract art, and whether realist or politically committed art is necessarily the most valuable. Vonnegut, an accomplished surrealist, sends himself up by having Circe mock Rabo for writing a memoir in chunks of a few paragraphs and for entirely avoiding the use of semicolons, both hallmarks of Vonnegut’s own style.
Circe’s a popular young-adult novelist, though the consensus is that she has no great literary merit despite being confident in her political opinions. It’s possible to read Circe as the spokeswoman for popular art, or for Vonnegut’s own commercial instincts, but she’s distinctive enough and has enough depth and interiority that she resists becoming a simple allegory.
Overall, the book’s what the Germans usefully call a künstlerroman, a portrait of an artist as a young man. In this case it’s told by the young artist in old age; we see how he turned out. The book’s held together less by a plot than by the reader gradually uncovering how Rabo’s perspective on art changes over the course of the book. And it’s gripping.
Technically gifted but lacking soul, Rabo studies under Dan Gregory, a commercial illustrator in the vein of Rockwell or N.C. Wyeth but more fascist. Later, Rabo befriends painters who’ll become known as Abstract Expressionists, and dabbles in abstraction himself. Still later, he produces a mysterious other painting and keeps it in his potato shed, Bluebeard’s secret room.
The mystery of that painting builds through the book, and has a satisfying resolution that ties together all the themes the novel plays with. If lacking in a traditional plot, the book’s engaging. As always, some of that reader engagement comes from Vonnegut’s prose. He’s especially on his game here, creating a distinctive voice for Rabo unlike his first-person narrators in previous books.
Rabo first appeared in one of those previous books, Breakfast of Champions, or at least some character named Rabo Karabekian first appeared there. Vonnegut’s less interested in continuity than character as symbol. The earlier Rabo was an artist; so is this one, and therefore he’s a way of talking about art.
Vonnegut was 65 when Bluebeard came out, and it’s striking to see a veteran novelist turn to interrogating the nature of art and questioning what kind of art’s worth praising. Especially when the writer’s known for his surrealism and uses a realistic story to talk about realism and abstraction in art.
As I read the book, the final argument is simply that each artist must find the form that works for them. Vonnegut found, over the course of his career, a number of forms. Bluebeard is perhaps the furthest he went in the direction of realism. That doesn’t make it the best of his books. But it does remind us how many different styles he could master.