The Painter Novel

Gideon Leek reviews Sophie Madeline Dess’s “What You Make of Me.”

By Gideon LeekFebruary 25, 2025

• Fiction

• Art & Architecture

“IN MY EXPERIENCE painters are far less conventional than writers,” says Rachel Cusk in her 2014 novel Outline. Writers, hesitant about filling their novels with authorial doubles, have a tendency to put their self-inserts in smocks. These painter protagonists are a mistake. Using painting to talk about writing does a disservice to both art forms. Painters and writers don’t think the same, don’t act the same. They certainly don’t write the same. Compare an excellent but conventional painter novel like Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye (1988), based on her own childhood but with Atwood recast as a budding painter, to the strange novels painters actually write—Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side (1908), Salvador Dalí’s Hidden Faces (1944), Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book (1972), Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1974). Novels like Atwood’s are rich with insight into painting, but their painter characterizations fall flat. Writers tend to assume painters think like them, but they don’t. Sophie Madeline Dess, an accomplished art critic before she pivoted to fiction, knows this. In What You Make of Me (2025), she has written not only a very good novel about painting but also a believable painter’s novel.

The painter is Ava (no last name). She has decided to write a novel about her brother, Demetri, a writer. Originally, she had been asked for a brochure, some trifold copy to pass out at an exhibition of paintings she’d done of Demetri during his long, slow death, but things got out of hand. Suddenly, she had a monograph full of the familial and artistic challenges that they faced together and that ultimately drove them apart. The novel’s narrative is straightforward. Ava and Demetri lose their mother to suicide and their father to grief. They come to rely on each other. Demetri is the smart one, Ava the talented one. He goes to Harvard, a good place for the smart, and Ava follows him, hiding like a gremlin in his dorm. Their father does not seem to see anything amiss about this.

At Harvard, Demetri meets the right people to get Ava’s painting career off the ground. Soon, he starts directing her progress, working as a hype man, agent, and muse. This carnival barker gig is a bad fit. Demetri doesn’t seem to really get her art—it’s not to his taste—and even if he is able to help package it, his involvement is holding them both back.

Dess is funny about this dissonance between painter and promoter. Ava recalls, “I stood behind the doorman’s desk and sketched the security footage,” painting every resident in her building for a collection she wants to call Getting to Know the Neighbor. When Demetri writes the release, he retitles the series The Watchman, telling critics that Ava was “an artist who took modern themes of surveillance seriously.” But she’s not—she doesn’t care about surveillance. Her work is fueled by impulse, not intellect. She gets ideas for paintings, not ideas for the themes of paintings.

Ava’s portraits tend to be less than complimentary. Ava admits that she tends to “miniaturize people to better pin and wield them into objects of creation.” One friend says to her, “[Y]ou look at people and you make them feel dead.” As she meets people, Ava is always squeezing them into a frame: “Her uneven eyes, looking in their split directions”; “his nose a blade slicing through the blur of trees”; “She is chatty and structurally perfect.” She uses sex (with, for example, drunk frat boys) and surveillance to get her subjects because people hate being painted by her. When solicited for a sitting, one friend, a high-powered gallerist, asks: “You won’t make me look vulnerable? I have a feeling you won’t be able to help it. I’ve seen what you make of people.” After one portrait, Demetri makes Ava swear his face will be “forever off-limits.”

Ava’s eye is not intentionally insulting; she just has an aesthetic that others find hard to relate to. At one point during a childhood trip to the Caribbean, she recalls stopping a flight attendant: “Ava told him she thought he was beautiful, and that he had beautiful eyes. She thought it was good form to let a person know.” This is what Ava finds unnerving about criticism and what other people find unnerving about her. Wouldn’t it be good form if we all were just open about what we’re really seeing? Why can’t she live in a world that understands her simply, as she does herself: “[P]lain-faced with blueberry eyes, my hair dyed some variation of oat or vanilla, shirt and pants bleeding together in one wheaty monochrome.”

At the same time, Ava is also intentionally insulting. Recalling a childhood meeting with another painter, more of a hobbyist, really, she writes: “Even back then I must have thought some variation of, This person only drinks wine.” Even worse than dabblers are critics: “They could think in sweeping categories, they could synthesize great quantities of information, but they let this broad vision obscure the individual, and one could see that their lack of imagination and courage to create for themselves was really their fundamental grievance.” Whether they approved or disapproved of her or her work, their insights were simply mystification. “[W]riting—with all its specifics—has a harder time with the real,” writes Ava. For a painter, detail is just one stylistic choice, so why do writers get all bent out of shape?

This perhaps explains Ava’s difficulty with thinking up critic-proof themes. At one point, she pitches Demetri a series called LiveStreaming: “The idea is to set up an easel next to my bed, have sex with men, and paint in watercolor as they enter me.” “Do you see?” she asks Demetri. “Watercolor, an old-fashioned medium … intimate … but a modern exposure … a modern title …” “That’s too easy, Ava,” says Demetri. “It will actually be extremely difficult,” she replies, dry and dismissive. Demetri loses the argument, but because of the gimmicky theme, critics seem unable to view LiveStreaming as art, only ambiguous politics. “I’d been called ‘powerful’ but they didn’t know if the watercolor of me being railed from behind was ‘liberative’ for women or if it only ‘reaffirmed submission.’” By using provocative modern-day topics (surveillance, sex) but failing to make clear the painting’s ideology or lack thereof, Ava leaves critics looking for a hidden political statement, instead of forcing them to consider the artistic one before their eyes.

This is ironic, of course, given that Dess is a wonderful critic. Here’s Dess on Lucian Freud: “[Y]ou notice that Tilly’s eyes aren’t just closed; they’re collapsed into their sockets. Her lips are more than shut; they’re thoroughly sealed.” On Jeff Koons: “The subtle menace of Koons’s work is born of its steely sheen, which works like a grin plastered on a face.” On Friedrich Nietzsche: “The usual targets are abused (Socrates, Kant, et cetera). So are George Sand, George Eliot, and, of course, generally happy people.” On performance art: “‘Oh fuck,’ I hear him say. Now he’s really writhing: ‘Fuck. Shit.’” She doesn’t seem to lack imagination or courage, and I don’t sense much grievance in her work—she’s informative, insightful, and funny. If you like criticism, she’s good. But over the last few years, Dess has pivoted, largely moving away from writing criticism—in prestige outlets including The Atlantic, The New Republic, and the Los Angeles Review of Books—and instead placing short stories in sceney publications—Hobart, The Drift, and the in-house literary magazine for KGB Bar in the East Village. She has gone from being a buttoned-up critic to a hip artist, from Demetri to Ava. What You Make of Me is a dialectical novel, the story of an artist working through a creative divergence to move herself forward. Demetri represents Dess’s worst fears about being a critic, Ava her worst fears about what it might mean to be an artist, and their synthesis is the exciting young author who wrote this novel. Yes, Dess is killing the critic inside her, but she’s honoring her too.

Eventually, their creative partnership ends, and Demetri pivots. His own professional career is what Ava might call “art adjacent”—he has a poster up of some Dust Bowl boys from a documentary he produced, and he writes speeches for an organization called Big Talk, where he works in the “Future and Storytelling division.” Ava is not especially impressed by these jobs. “You have to research what they tell you?” she asks, horrified. Shouldn’t her brother be an artist instead of a patsy? “It’s terrible to say out loud,” she says, “but I actually do want you to succeed, you know, in feeling free.” Demetri takes this poorly. “Being beholden to you is a limit to my freedom.” As if Ava could understand that, in their creative partnership, her unlimited artistic freedom was an ever-changing prison to him.

Their final split is over a woman. Ava gets to paint her, while Demetri gets to love her. Jealousy abounds. Then, suddenly, he has a brain tumor and none of that really matters. You can’t be jealous when you have to deal with balding and blacking out. It’s hard to glare at someone when you spend 18 hours a day with your eyes closed, impossible to stand up to someone when you can’t even get out of bed. It’s here that Ava realizes that her sibling rivalry has ended. Soon after, she begins the series of portraits, diverting all that energy into art.

Dess’s stylistic construction of the portraits is clever. She contrasts the specific and endless hedging details of narrative with descriptions of paintings interspersed as footnotes throughout the text. Drawn to seemingly random and often trivial words, she explains the paintings through clipped, workmanlike descriptions. Farts (“textured joint compound on canvas, medium”), Fearful (“acrylic on small ceramic plate”), Butter (“oil on linen, small”). Just brief sentences dealing with materials and methods. These are not portraits her brother sat for: instead of painting him fading away on life support, she is looking back into their shared memories. The story is largely Ava’s, but all the paintings are of Demetri.

With his death coming within days, Ava no longer feels bound by Demetri’s prohibition on his face being painted. She has settled instead for leaving him unrecognizable: “In real life my brother has a straight line down his nose, caramel hair that waves upward, and eyes that are a very different blue, like there’s black beneath them.” In this final series, he has become more abstract: “You might mistake his cheek for an elephant tusk. His mouth for a small vat of blood. His nose the cracked edge of a tile.” Even if she didn’t know it, it seems that by becoming a writer, Ava has started to have a harder time with the real. With her hard-eyed portraits, Ava had always exposed imperfections and exploited vulnerabilities, but now she is layering them over with experiences, emotions, secrets. She hasn’t stopped being unbounded and creative, but she has begun to dabble in deep research. After all, what better way to paint her critic brother than with the method he would have chosen.

While much of Demetri’s discursiveness and intellectualizing is omitted from the book, a little goes a long way. But there is one bit of mild condescension Ava has left in. “It takes three years to know someone in a stable way,” says Demetri, citing something he read about “biochemicals.” “Unless you’re in an extremely healthy relationship. Then the chemicals never stabilize. And you are free to continue to misunderstand each other in a way that’s good for both of you.” There is no scientific basis for this statement—it’s merely a dig against Ava’s decisive way of seeing others. But there’s something of Ava’s new novelistic method in Demetri’s alternative facts. If you see right through someone, that’s it, but if you can’t get past their mask or the mask you lay on them, then your understanding of them can change and develop over time. When you figure someone out, you dismiss them. It’s the people who never quite come into focus, who are always two steps away, that are really interesting, and Ava, after a lifetime of artistic conquests, finally seems to have found a way of exploring subjects that requires her to settle down. So what if it’s not conventional?