The Nude
by Michelle Lindley
2024
The Nude is a literary novel about an American curator going to Greece to acquire a newly discovered statue of a nude woman for her museum. I perhaps should've given more thought to what it meant that I saw it on a list of the best book covers for the month it was released, but not on any of the lists of the best reviewed books for that month.
Most of The Nude is intended to be slow-burning tension and mounting internal turmoil as Dr Elizabeth Clark becomes more and more anxious from the heat, the jet lag, her migraine headaches, her pill addictions, her increasingly erotic fascination with her translator Niko and his artist wife Theo, haunting childhood memories of her dead sister; with the Greek museum's slow-walking the acquisition, protests against the expatriation of ancient art, vandals attempting to sabotage the statue to send a message; her failing marriage back home, pressure and doubt about her abilities from her museum director back home, competition from her rival over who will take over as director after this buy... It all accumulates and Elizabeth's behavior becomes more erratic until the vandals succeed in damaging the statue and Elizabeth reaches a breaking point of her own.
There are two problems though, and I think they're kind of related. There's not enough tension, and not enough payoff. Although things keep happening, and it seems clear that eventually Elizabeth will become overwhelmed and act out in some way, author Michelle Lindley blends the anxious with the ordinary in a way that probably makes the book more realistic, but also seems to rob it of some of its potential power. Elizabeth belongs in a thriller, the plot structure wants to be a thriller, but it's not, you know, thrilling enough.
In Elizabeth, Lindley has created a protagonist who belongs in transgressive fiction. She's someone who feels fundamentally unable to fit into society, who constantly strives to appear perfect and succeed at work, but who's so tortured by her own psyche that she seems always on the brink of disaster. Elizabeth is ultra-controlled, always anxious, always unhappy. She hates her body, starves herself and recoils from casual touch, but also loves her painkillers and tranquilizers, loves to binge eat as a treat, and sleeps with men in a mercenary way to advance her career. Her migraines are debilitating and make her see hallucinatory auras; she's gone hysterically blind twice in her life and fears it'll happen again, maybe even on this trip, especially since she's taking her pills too quickly and they might not last.
There's all the ingredients for steadily ratcheting tension, perhaps with minor outbursts building toward a major eruption. But Lindley continually undercuts the anxiety with normality. There are too many possible sources of stress, but none of them get enough attention. Nothing can really build up, because it all keeps alternating. Every unsettling thought or moment is counteracted with something prosaic. Even the suspicion that Elizabeth slept with a major donor to the Greek museum, or perhaps was assaulted by him, while she was awake and ambulatory, but not conscious or forming memories, just goes nowhere and ultimately comes to nothing, dropped and forgotten.
None of the stress keeps Elizabeth from keeping up appearances and going through the motions; and all the other characters seem perpetually relaxed, unbothered, unhurried. It should create more frisson! Elizabeth is not fun or normal! But she's desperate to be liked, desperate for others to think she's fun and chill, and determined that no one should suspect her of being uncool enough to care what they think of her.
She acts out some, but not in ways that are truly satisfying or cathartic. The migraine imagery is too brief before the pills kick in; we never get a full phantasmagoria. She's obsessed with sexy free-spirited Theo, her first time being attracted to a woman, possibly her first time actually desiring a person and not just the social advantage she can gain from them, and Theo is interested back, so when Elizabeth eventually stops trying to please everyone else and gives in to her own desires and urges, you might expect the two women to do more than kiss a couple times. But no.
It's incredibly anticlimactic. And I think kind of emblematic of the way that Lindley's efforts to make her book literary and realistic prevent it from delivering the pleasure that we'd get from watching real chaos. At one point near the end, Elizabeth tells us she feels feral, feels unhinged. That is what I'd spent the whole book up to that point waiting for! But even though she says it, she doesn't really do it. Instead of fireworks, everything mostly fizzles.
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