The Painter Gabriel

by Donald Newlove

348 pp.

313 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Donald Newlove was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1928, and currently lives in New York City's Greenwich Village. As a reporter, book reviewer, and short story writer, his work appeared in Esquire, New York Magazine, Evergreen Review, and The Saturday Review. His first novel, The Painter Gabriel (1970), was hailed by Time Magazine as "one of the best fictional studies of madness, descent, and purification that any American has written since Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Newlove is the author of several other novels, a series of books on the art of writing, and the critically acclaimed memoir, Those Drinking Days: Myself and Other Writers (1981).

Reviews

[Casey · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's difficult to feel very strongly about Donald Newlove's The Painter Gabriel. At every turn of the page, the words mostly stay on the page and inspire only indifference. Here is a book about inspiration and madness, but written from a place that feels as if Newlove doesn't necessarily believe in any of it. And it would make sense that he doesn't.

The Painter Gabriel was published in 1970, well after the beat poets had found their galvanizing energies emptied into the evil machinery of America, well after Gaddis had laid bare the spiritual vacuum that awaits artists who believe in inspiration, with madness being the only escape. Newlove's characters, though they talk up a storm, seem so stuck in a past they didn't belong to. Had these characters been a decade younger or had the events taken place a decade earlier, there might have been the ring of the genuine. We have the titular Gabriel saying words about spirits and love, but does any reader believe it? “[W]hen I'm in love I think of the woman I love as my soul made manifest outside my body—and I can't see my soul walking around in an Afro hair-do.” The unconfronted falsity of Gabriel is never dealt with in any meaningful way. Like the other characters who surround him, he's flat beyond the words he says. Another character says “Three-quarters of the people you pass on the street are skulled by drudgery, man, all they can think of is the rent and bread.” It's the sort of vapid observation a solipsistic teen might make. Shallow and superficial characters can be fun—just look at some of the characters of Gaddis, or Evelyn Waugh for that matter—but they need some prodding.

Still, I liked the periphery of The Painter Gabriel. Newlove can give a setting some character, even when he fails with people. Take this for example: “At winter's end, lightning flickers over the city but cannot awaken the trees. The yellow light smacks the brown grass but cannot raise the first yellow shoots from the earth. And with great heavenly power, the rains begin, filling the streets with dead branches and pooling at the sewers in tides. The sky is green as aging meat and only April lepers are abroad. Hands glow on the windowsills and pale slugs stare at each other's cells through the green silver of rainy Saturday in Manhattan.” And while the characters were never developed to a satisfactory extent, I liked the peek into all the "groups" that gained traction by the tail-end of the 60's, especially through Dave's "confessionalism" and Dulcie, who is a Scientologist.

Seeing as this was Newlove's first novel, I will have to check out some of his works that followed. There's some promising writing here, but it feels caught in a past, paying its dues to its inspirations rather than establishing itself as a work of individuality, or—dare I say—originality.

[Randy Cox · Rating 4 out of 5]

I discovered Donald Newlove through Sweet Adversity, put back into print by Tough Poets Press a few years ago. Though Sweet Adversity, a bonkers masterpiece, will never have the large audience it deserved, its reach is greater than it has been in decades. Tough Poets Press has continued to rescue Newlove’s bibliography, which includes his debut novel, The Painter Gabriel. It lacks the invention that marked Sweet Adversity and The Wolf Who Swallowed the Sun, but his humor lifts this above other volumes that primarily consist of Bohemian types prattling around about art. Each new character introduced in the long first section is a delightful new voice that throws the barely made peace off-balance. Hopefully Tough Poets Press won’t rest until Newlove’s major works are back in print.