Black & White

From the author of Family History ("Poised, absorbing...a bona fide page turner" The New York Times Book Review) and the best-selling memoir Slow Motion, a spellbinding novel about art, fame, ambition, and family that explores a provocative question: Is it possible for a mother to be true to herself and true to her children at the same time?

Clara Brodeur has spent her entire adult life pulling herself away from her famous mother, the renowned and controversial photographer Ruth Dunne, whose towering reputation rests on the unsettling nude portraits she took of her young daughter from the ages of three to fourteen. The Clara Series, which graced the walls of museums around the world as well as the pages of New York City tabloids that labeled the work pornographic, cast a long and inescapable shadow over its subject. At eighteen, when Clara might have entered university and begun to shape an identity beyond her sensationalized, unsought role in the New York art world, she fled to the quiet obscurity of small-town Maine, where she married and had a child, a daughter whom she has tried to shield from the central facts of her early life and her damaging role as her mother's muse.

Fourteen years later, Ruth Dunne is dying, and Clara is summoned to her bedside. Despite her anguish and ambivalence about confronting a family life she has repressed and denied for more than a decade, Clara returns. She finds Ruth surrounded, even in her illness, by worshipful interns, protective assistants, and her conniving art dealer.

Once again, she is Clara Dunne, the object of curiosity, the girl in the photos. Except this time she has her own daughter to think about — a girl who at nine looks strikingly like the girl in Ruth's photos — and she yearns to protect her, to insulate her from the exposure that will inevitably result when her two worlds, New York and Maine, collide.

As Clara charts a path connecting her childhood with her adult life, Shapiro's novel weaves together past and present in images as stark and intense as the photographs that tore the Dunnes apart. A brilliant examination of motherhood — a novel that pits artistic inspiration against maternal obligation and asks whether the two can ever be fully reconciled — Black & White explores the limits and duties of family loyalties, and even of love. Gripping, haunting, psychologically complex, this is Shapiro at her captivating best.

"Clara, the protagonist of Shapiro's uneven fifth novel (after Family History), is the youngest daughter and muse of Ruth Dunne, a famous Manhattan photographer who made her name shooting Sally Mann-style (read: nude and provocative) photos of a young Clara. Unable to bear the humiliation of being 'the girl in those pictures,' Clara runs away from home at 18. Fourteen years later and still estranged from her mother, Clara's living in Maine with her husband and daughter when her older sister calls and tells her Ruth is in failing health. Clara travels back to Manhattan, where she comes to terms with her family and herself. Though Clara's frequent bemoaning of her emotional scars tries the reader's patience, Shapiro's sharp depictions of love and shame go a long way toward putting the self-pity into relief. It's unfortunate that Ruth fails to comes across as anything more than a narcissistic artist, but the novel offers some fine insights into marriage, the making of art and the often difficult mother-daughter dynamic." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Dani Shapiro, the author of several novels, including 'Family History,' and the memoir 'Slow Motion,' has chosen a risky subject for her latest book, one that even a first-class writer could botch in a hundred different ways. Whether she can engage readers depends less on the provocative glamour of her premise than on the quality of her technique.

At the bright, hot center of 'Black... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) & White' is Ruth Dunne, a famous photographer who established her reputation in the 1970s art world with nude portraits of her young daughter, Clara. Ruth shares some resemblances with the real-life photographer Sally Mann, whose pictures of her three children in suggestive poses incited accusations of child pornography in the 1990s. But between the real Sally Mann and the fictional Ruth Dunne there is one crucial distinction. Mann insists her children were always ready collaborators in their mother's art, while Ruth, as Shapiro imagines her, coerced her daughter into participating in her photo sessions from the time Clara was 3 until she was 14. The intensity of the sessions and the notoriety the pictures caused left Clara with permanent emotional scars.

Written from Clara's point of view, the novel begins nearly two decades later, after she has worked hard to erase her past and sever all connections to her mother. Settled in a small town in Maine, married to a jeweler and busy caring for their 9-year-old daughter, Sammy, Clara has no wish ever to return to Manhattan, from which she fled when she was 18 after her father's unexpected death.

An urgent phone call from her older sister, Robin, a lawyer with a Park Avenue home and three children of her own, reminds Clara that her carefully constructed adult life is only 'a flimsy thing, a thin shell about to be cracked wide open.' Ruth is dying of lung cancer, and Robin — whose childhood was as marred by her mother's neglect as Clara's was by obsessive attention — is asking for hands-on help that only her sister can deliver.

Barely begun, 'Black & White' at this point already sends warnings of trouble ahead. Ruth's cancer suggests the probability of melodrama, with a good chance of soggy mother-daughter reconciliation. Add to this that depicting New York art-world denizens is a challenge for even the most authoritative writers, their attempts often lapsing into brittle caricature. And equally tricky is the translation of the photographer's world in which Ruth lives to the world of the novelist, who has only words to play with.

After setting herself up for so much potential failure, Shapiro does something rather thrilling with her story: She gets it just right.

After 14 silent years, there isn't a trace of sentimentality in the reunion of Ruth and Clara. Instead, Clara becomes entangled convincingly in a snare of complex emotions: anger, guilt, fear, regret and, most painful of all, inescapable devotion. Ruth is a surprisingly sympathetic character whose love for her daughters, while ruinous, also seems genuine.

Clara is able to appreciate, if she can't quite forgive, her mother's predatory greed for artistic expression, and admits that the trauma of serving as Ruth's muse was mixed with a troubling gratification: 'Ruth lives for the images in her mind — she has never been able to live for anything else. For a long time, Clara was that image. And during those darkest, most golden years, her mother lived for her.'

As it turns out, Clara's refusal to tell her daughter, Sammy, anything about Ruth or her past has had its own damaging effects. Through skillful transitions between scenes from Clara's childhood and the present, Shapiro makes a believable case that Sammy, who resembles Clara exactly, is suffering from her mother's overbearing urge to control, just as Ruth's implacable gaze through her camera lens had tried to control young Clara.

It seems natural rather than forced that Clara turns abruptly contrite during Ruth's swift decline, and returns to Maine to fetch Sammy to New York for a last-minute introduction. A scene at this point perfectly displays Shapiro's commanding craftsmanship: Ruth, with the demonic burst of energy that often possesses end-stage cancer patients, insists on taking Clara and Sammy gallery-hopping through Chelsea. Funny and tragic, the episode expertly describes the milieu through which Ruth has glided like an empress all her life, at the same time taking stock of Clara's dread and Sammy's childish ennui. It's a portrait in three dimensions that beautifully captures both the stark black-and-white urgency of the moment and a range of subtler, softer shades of gray.

" Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, whose e-mail address is mondaythrillers(at symbol)aol.comCarolyn See, who can be reached at www.carolynsee.comCeci Connolly, a Washington Post staff writer on leave in Mexico CityDavid J. Montgomery, who edits Mystery Ink and writes frequently about mysteries and thrillersDonna Rifkind, a novelist and critic, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"The story unfolds beautifully, drawing the reader into the family drama....[P]sychologically gripping....Recommended..." Library Journal

"Victimhood presented, as the title suggests, in stark terms, with only occasional flashes of insight." Kirkus Reviews

"[O]ver-the-top....As the title suggests, Shapiro renders this interesting conflict in stark black and white. The novel would have been much more compelling had she used some shades of grey." Booklist

"After setting herself up for...potential failure, Shapiro does something rather thrilling with her story: She gets it just right." Washington Post

"[Shapiro] writes with an economy that draws the reader into the dramatic fray of the scenes, without the curse of melodrama." Providence Journal

"[P]provocative, hypnotic..." USA Today

"Universal dilemmas...face us all, and it is the novelist's job to breathe life into them one way or another, and this is something Shapiro does very well indeed." New York Times

"Trenchant and enduring...Shapiro elegantly and movingly portrays the troubled relationship young Clara has with a mother who uses her for her own artistic aims..." Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Ambitious...thrilling...Shapiro's subtle, nuanced handling of her material emphasizes the radical subjectivity of experience, and builds into a powerful and compelling point." Time Out New York

"Enthralling, fast-paced and a great read. Black & White presents knotty, compelling issues that Shapiro examines intelligently and without gratuitous drama." The Miami Herald

"Shapiro's central characters are expertly rendered: both the damaged Clara, whose childhood trust in and love for her mother was abused, and Ruth, whose love for her daughter and her art were so inextricably linked that they became interchangeable." Elle

From the acclaimed author of Family History and the bestselling memoir Slow Motion comes a sensational new novel about mothers and daughters.

Dani Shapiro's most recent books include Family History and Slow Motion. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker; Granta; Elle; O, The Oprah Magazine; and Ploughshares, and has been broadcast on National Public Radio. She is currently a visiting writer at Wesleyan University. She lives with her husband and son in Litchfield County, Connecticut.