The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque by Jeffrey Ford

My tags are inadequate today: this is a novel of historical fiction, without anything I'd call a fantasy element (there is some background that could be fantastic, if the reader wants to take it that way). I guess I could call it "Literature:" Ford is a fine writer, and always a thoughtful one. But I think his big-house novels - this one came from Morrow, in 2002 - tended to use thriller plots and settle in more to what we used to call the "smart commercial" end of the market.

Anyway, I've had this book on the shelf for a long time, and I've read less of Ford than I think I should. (I know I read The Girl in the Glass way back when, but can't recall if I read either or both of The Drowned Life or The Shadow Year, though I'm pretty sure I had copies of both of them before The Flood [1].)

The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque is told by Piero Piambo, a popular society portraitist in 1893 New York. He's skilled and experienced, in the middle of a career both financially lucrative and artistically satisfying - though, in the way of things, it's been tipping more to the former than the latter recently, in ways that worry Piambo.

He is hired by a mysterious woman, the Mrs. Charbuque of the title, to paint her portrait, under strange conditions. She will sit behind a screen and he will ask her questions, one hour a day for several weeks, and then he will paint her without ever having seen her. His commission will be immense, but if he captures her true likeness, she will double even that.

Piambo learns that Mrs. Charbuque sees, and has been seen by, no one at all. She has one servant, a blind man, and is a complete recluse. She tells him stories of a strange childhood spent with a father obsessed with a divination method using snowflakes - one of many such seers and forecasters then employed, at great expense, by one of the great, famous industrialists of the prior generation. Piambo intends to ask her probing questions, to get a sense of her essence to inform his painting, but she instead keeps telling these long, unlikely stories of snowflake-scrying and her slightly later life as the Sybil, giving fortunes to groups of the rich and connected across two continents from behind her ubiquitous screen.

The rest of Piambo's life is unsettled by this commission: his relationship with the actress Samantha suffers from his near-obsession with Mrs. Charbuque's unseen face, and some other events that seem to be unrelated begin to pile up in odd ways. And then Mr. Charbuque - whom his wife has said is definitively dead in a shipwreck - starts to threaten Piambo, with a frantic jealousy and a facility to get secretly close to him.

It all crashes together at the end, and there is a shocking secret, as there must be. It's more of a thriller or a mystery than a fantasy, as I said, though elements are near-fantastic. It's in the genteel historical mode of The Alienist and its followers: I don't think Mrs. Charbuque was as successful as the big books of that sub-genre, but there's no reason it shouldn't have been. It's smart, and moves well, with finely-drawn people and an interesting narrator, and the plot moves in a lovely natural way to form a "thriller" that isn't just about stringing thrills together.

[1] An actual, physical flood of my house, back in 2011. Destroyed the basement, including what I keep saying was 10,000 books - though, as time passes, I've been questioning my memory of that number.