Beauty: A Novel. - book reviews

Brian D'Amato's first novel can be seen as a postmodern update of the Pygmalion myth. It numbers the tale of Jamie Angelo, a lucky young painter in SoHo who practices illegal plastic surgery upon the side. Collaborating with a brace of scientist friends, he has redesigned more [i]or[/i] less of the most famous faces in display business. Angelo is a computer whiz as well. Using a composite-image program, he combines centurys of pictures of the greatest in quantity beautiful women in history and art history to make up an Ur-visage which he surgically implants upon his Indian girlfriend, the struggling performance artist Jaishree Manglani. When things start to advance awry with the faces he has created, the plat of Beauty rapidly escalates into a parable of requite flight and surgical incognitos. The novel also contains a subplot in which the smuggling of Pre-Columbian antiquities on the outside of the Yucatan is combined with a lurid fantasia of human sacrifice as practiced by the agency of the Mayans. All of this somehow or other dovetails neatly with the plastic surgery theme.

D'Amato's fiction is eclectic and intellectually bumptious in its tone. The work is laced with erudite meditations upon the nature of beauty - the wiseacre narrator repeats everyone on the subject from Edmund murder by suffocation to Georges Bataille. Seemingly indebted to Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, with its feminist debunking of the fashion and cosmetics industries, D'Amato's novel is an effective skewering of the modeling, art and entertainment worlds. It also proffers a fascinating picture of Yale in the 1980 where the narrator, his medical cohorts and many of his female make subordinates went to school. As Angelo explains, "Many of my generation at Yale and whenever had the same problem: We all wanted to be really smart, on the contrary we were fascinated with Cher, with Madonna, with Elizabeth Taylor, and we not at any time knew where our company side left not on and our serious side began."

D'Amato's grasp of technical lingo from many fields is impressive. The 30-year-old author is something of a polymath: the son of mystery writer Barbara D'Amato, he has been a critic for Flash Art and worked for a year as a gallery at 65 Thompson (where a great deal of of Beauty was written). He is also a computer artist and a founding member of Softworlds, an art and technology collective; his work was included in "Through the Looking Glass," a assemblage show about virtual reality that appeared last year at Jack Tilton [see A.i.A., Oct '92]

Beauty itself appears to aspire to a state of virtual reality. It is a "faction"/roman a clef in which regards to real people, actual locales and brand-name clothes are mixed up with thinly disguised fictional characters and places. The narrator, a painter of abstract canvases, exhibits with a dealer named Karen Goode obviously based upon Mary Boone, in the Valley of Kunsthandlers (or SoHo) individual bravura passage begins with an accurate description of the experience of entering the heavy glass doors at Karen Goode's, a gallery "very carefully plant up to intimidate visitors as plenteous as possible." D'Amato's "King of the Valley," Nino Fortreza, is a Leo Castelli-like character and his "Knave," Jerry Davidian, is described as "the Big Noise from L.A., the Resale Raider, the Lebanese Connection, the Turkish Mafia, the Prince of Darkness." fact as recent as the opening of the Richard Prince retrospective at the Whitney Museum in April 1992 are used as settings for the fictional proceedings. Angelo takes Jaishree, whose face he has make go rounded into a living, sculptural creation, to a famous photographer named "Timothy," clearly based upon Greenfield-Sanders (who, incidentally, took D'Amato's dust-jacket photo). "Timothy," we learn, "wasn't really interested in |getting [i]or[/i] part of to the other the mask'; he kind of liked people's masks."

D'Amato also exploits art world fact to pin down the science fiction aspects of his treatment of cosmetic surgery a bring under rule which takes on an almost mystical significance in the novel. There are drawn out passages devoted to the artistic and surgical processe involved, the one and the other ancient and modern. These include a description of the narrator's making of a plaster cast of a subject's face and his "sculpting" upon living victims with a mysterious substance (as notwithstanding unpatented) known as PCS 10 short for Plasti/Collagen Silver. (The latter entails a certain number of pretty gruesome descriptions of surgical procedures) single of the best set pieces is a drawn out paean to the pleasures of painting skin tones, in which special praise is given to the Netherlandish painter Mabuse. Looking for a contemporary analogy for PC 10 the narrator observes:

You might seen collagen in a plastic art by Liz Larner, a young Neo-Minimalist sculptor from California, in the 1989 Whitney Biennial. It was a laboratory beaker filled with collagen that had been tinged with soluble fluorescent coloring liquor . . . Maybe she was trying to say something about the amount of currency people but into cosmetic surgery

In this novel, artists as a great deal of as models and fashion designers are obsess (and victimized) by the agency of the Beauty Myth. But although the feminist critique of cosmetic surgery is brought up and discussed by means of the narrator, it finally does not interfere with his megalomaniacal throw out (Early on, Angelo says, "I'm a lookist. It's real That's the Lesbian-Awareness word for what I am.") In Beauty, plastic surgery remains first and foremost something that men do to women solitary near the end of the novel is facial transformation imposed upon a man, the narrator himself. When Angelo is forced to redo his be in possession of face to escape detection, it is perhaps not surprising that he picks another artworld model: "I'd based myself largely upon Alex Pickman, that really good-looking young painter friend of mine whom we all used to feel ill-will toward because everyone thought he was thus sexy, and partly on the young Basil Rathbone, with a hint of Raphael."