Writer’s Canvas

Fresh off the success of his first novel, The Dog Stars, longtime nonfiction writer Heller follows with a riveting suspense story about an expressionist painter and fisherman from Taos, New Mexico, who is fully experienced

in the ways of personal loss, extreme violence and profound beauty. The more he attempts to escape the demons of his past, the more he must wrestle with his ambiguous notions of good and evil. Is he a good person even if his rage inflicts harm upon bad people? As he muses over his misdeeds, the protago- nist is slowly pursued across a Western landscape by someone seeking revenge, a sinister force who could well teach him a lesson—but not the one you might expect.

The Painter KNOPF 384 PP. $25

named Amazon’s “best book of the month” for May, Heller started The Painter immediately after he completed The Dog Stars. he didn’t know the ending when he wrote the first sentence: “i never imagined i would shoot a man.” heller says he doesn’t want to know where his fiction is headed. “i was an expedition kayaker for many years, and one thing I loved about being on a river that had never been run was that you would come to a tight bend in a canyon and never know what was around the corner,” says the author. “it might be a pool, or a waterfall, a mountain lion drinking; nine men with bows and arrows if you were on the right river; you didn’t know. i loved that. i wanted that in writing fiction: to be surprised, thrilled, shocked.”

After jotting down his first line Heller was intrigued and kept on writing. “The voice was somehow tough but clearly in pain,” says heller. The former english major says he’s wanted to write since age 6. When he read hemingway’s In Our Time at age 11, he says, “my jaw just dropped.” At Dartmouth Heller read the early Americans with Bill Cook, Ulysses with Peter bien, beckett with Louis renza, molière with John rassias. “Some of the best minds in literature opening those doors in usually small classes,” he says. “i loved it.”

heller’s hope for readers of The Painter is that they’ll identify with the story’s theme that “loss, if not redeemable, is our closest companion,” he says. “That beauty springs from it, as well as truth. That the richness and meaning of our lives may depend on how we integrate it, and on the courage and creativity we bring to bear.”