What do you think?
Rate this book
Landscape with Fragmented Figures: A Novel
Betrayed by his art and disillusioned by his job as a professor, Ray Casper finds his long-time girlfriend has just left him. At the death of his estranged father, he links up with his out-of-work brother Sammy, and things really get complicated. Sammy moves in with Ray and needs a job; Ray needs inspiration to paint again, and both have to keep from killing each other.
Landscape with Fragmented Figures unites academia and working class in a tale of brothers, fathers and sons, art and love. It’s a tale of what it means for all of us to live in America in these times.
Landscape with Fragmented Figures unites academia and working class in a tale of brothers, fathers and sons, art and love. It’s a tale of what it means for all of us to live in America in these times.
234 pages, Paperback
First published October 22, 2008
16 people want to read
About the author
Jeff Vande Zande
18 books16 followersJeff Vande Zande teaches fiction and screenwriting at Delta College. His books include the novel Into the Desperate Country (March Street Press), the novel Landscape with Fragmented Figures (Bottom Dog Press) and Threatened Species and Other Stories (Whistling Shade Press). His novel American Poet won a Michigan Notable Book Award from the Library of Michigan. In May of 2016, Whistling Shade Press released his most recent novel, Detroit Muscle, which was influenced by Vande Zande’s screenwriting knowledge. He maintains a website at authorjeffvandezande.blogspot.com.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 22, 2009
Cut Off from the Living: Victim or Perpetrator?
Jeff Vande Zande writes novels that creep up on the reader like a hint of a gloaming breeze on a stagnant summer evening. He understands the arid plain on which we walk, looking for some meaning or reason to keep living while refusing to remove our blinders. And just when his carefully constructed characters begin to resemble so closely those people around us to the point of wondering where the story is going, he has the gift to turn each of his Midwest 'tropes' into people of pulsating flesh and blood who just happen to lead each other, at times without knowledge of purpose, into levels of growth that drive them indelibly into our psyches.
LANDSCAPE WITH FRAGMENTED FIGURES (the thoughtful title is not fully appreciated until the closing pages of this beautifully constructed, sensitive novel) deals with the terrain of Michigan and Ohio and those folks who live too far from the seas that connect this country to the world to see too far beyond their own disappointing lives. Ray Casper differed from his abusive father and was jolted by the death by cancer mother enough to move away from home and its factory existence atmosphere to pursue a career as an artist: and from this point the story could be interpreted as a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Failure. Ray has a brother Sammy whose life seemed predestined to copy his father's image of drunken ignorance of hope in the future. Ray has been following a line of failed relationships and even worse, failed inspirations as a painter and has just been deserted by Diane, the fellow artist lover who can no longer tolerate his inability to cope with his self absorption and loss of a sense of being alive, when Sammy calls and tearfully informs him of his estranged father's death. The two brothers, polar opposites in many ways, reunite and out of obligation, Ray invites Sammy to move into his Michigan home in hopes of repairing his alcoholic aimless brother. The differences between the minds of the two brothers drive both in directions of ever more sad situations, until through a series of events which include the return of pregnant Diane to the fold and a line of tragedies ultimately bring Ray back into the realm of seeing the world with the gifted eye of a painter.
That is the brief outline of where this complex novel travels. What makes Vande Zande's writing so rich is his ability to explore the psyches of his characters while simultaneously educating the reader about art and about filial and life partner love and forgiveness. Phrases that color the pages follow: 'The sky is a giant canvas, the fireworks just a kind of temporary paint. Fugitive colors'; 'I haven't had a vision in a long time. I had a gimmick for awhile, which pretended to be a vision....But I'm starting to feel that's not enough...My art is vapid.'; 'You can't adopt somebody else's subconscious or their way to the subconscious. When it works, it's big. But it seldom works.'; 'Art cannot come from that which is not in the world.'; 'Mix visual with emotion and end up with art.'; 'You capture the truth about individuals you're painting, but then in that truth there is also universal truth...'. But even these brief quotations from Vande Zande's writing focus on only one aspect of this multilayered novel.
In the end each reader will find personal paths to better understanding not only of the bland world to which they have sadly become accustomed, but will identify with a well crafted cast of characters whose time on this planet will give that reassurance that the future can be better. Jeff Vande Zande writes about common people with familiar problems, people who go unrecognized on the street perhaps, but who in his probing novels stand for more universal truths than any reader can expect. He has a clue as to why we are here in the first place and offers fascinating maps for where we can go. He has the gift and continues to share even more with each new novel.
Grady Harp
Jeff Vande Zande writes novels that creep up on the reader like a hint of a gloaming breeze on a stagnant summer evening. He understands the arid plain on which we walk, looking for some meaning or reason to keep living while refusing to remove our blinders. And just when his carefully constructed characters begin to resemble so closely those people around us to the point of wondering where the story is going, he has the gift to turn each of his Midwest 'tropes' into people of pulsating flesh and blood who just happen to lead each other, at times without knowledge of purpose, into levels of growth that drive them indelibly into our psyches.
LANDSCAPE WITH FRAGMENTED FIGURES (the thoughtful title is not fully appreciated until the closing pages of this beautifully constructed, sensitive novel) deals with the terrain of Michigan and Ohio and those folks who live too far from the seas that connect this country to the world to see too far beyond their own disappointing lives. Ray Casper differed from his abusive father and was jolted by the death by cancer mother enough to move away from home and its factory existence atmosphere to pursue a career as an artist: and from this point the story could be interpreted as a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Failure. Ray has a brother Sammy whose life seemed predestined to copy his father's image of drunken ignorance of hope in the future. Ray has been following a line of failed relationships and even worse, failed inspirations as a painter and has just been deserted by Diane, the fellow artist lover who can no longer tolerate his inability to cope with his self absorption and loss of a sense of being alive, when Sammy calls and tearfully informs him of his estranged father's death. The two brothers, polar opposites in many ways, reunite and out of obligation, Ray invites Sammy to move into his Michigan home in hopes of repairing his alcoholic aimless brother. The differences between the minds of the two brothers drive both in directions of ever more sad situations, until through a series of events which include the return of pregnant Diane to the fold and a line of tragedies ultimately bring Ray back into the realm of seeing the world with the gifted eye of a painter.
That is the brief outline of where this complex novel travels. What makes Vande Zande's writing so rich is his ability to explore the psyches of his characters while simultaneously educating the reader about art and about filial and life partner love and forgiveness. Phrases that color the pages follow: 'The sky is a giant canvas, the fireworks just a kind of temporary paint. Fugitive colors'; 'I haven't had a vision in a long time. I had a gimmick for awhile, which pretended to be a vision....But I'm starting to feel that's not enough...My art is vapid.'; 'You can't adopt somebody else's subconscious or their way to the subconscious. When it works, it's big. But it seldom works.'; 'Art cannot come from that which is not in the world.'; 'Mix visual with emotion and end up with art.'; 'You capture the truth about individuals you're painting, but then in that truth there is also universal truth...'. But even these brief quotations from Vande Zande's writing focus on only one aspect of this multilayered novel.
In the end each reader will find personal paths to better understanding not only of the bland world to which they have sadly become accustomed, but will identify with a well crafted cast of characters whose time on this planet will give that reassurance that the future can be better. Jeff Vande Zande writes about common people with familiar problems, people who go unrecognized on the street perhaps, but who in his probing novels stand for more universal truths than any reader can expect. He has a clue as to why we are here in the first place and offers fascinating maps for where we can go. He has the gift and continues to share even more with each new novel.
Grady Harp
April 20, 2009
Landscape with Fragmented Figures demonstrates Jeff VandeZande's continued growth as a writer. JV returns to themes he worked with in his first novel, Into the Desperate Country --love, loss, Michigan-- but this time he does it through a family, and it is a family we are all familiar with, full of love and hate and anger and understanding, and ultimately forgiveness. It's about disillusionment and hope: two of the forces driving us that are in constant opposition, and yet both absolutely necessary for personal growth. The novel is once again firmly grounded in Michigan, and yet we get the feeling the story could, and does, occur everywhere around and within us all. JV shows that he understands the gulf that separates the worlds of art and academia from the blue collar work-a-day world, and yet he writes about both with equal grace and authority, without worship and without condescension, showing us what is base and what is noble in both. Truly an inspiring story...
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews