(She quits her job at an art gallery in obnoxious, scatological fashion.) But Moshfegh isn’t interested in grief or mental illness per se. (Her parents are both dead, and they’re much on her mind.) And if she’s not mentally ill, she’s certainly severely maladjusted socially. Moshfegh’s prickly fourth book ( Homesick for Another World, 2017, etc.) is narrated by an unnamed woman who’s decided to spend a year “hibernating.” She has a few conventional grief issues. Ono and his dilemma are rigidly contoured from the first-but we seem to be more reading about it than simultaneously suffering, feeling with it.Ī young New York woman figures there’s nothing wrong with existence that a fistful of prescriptions and months of napping wouldn’t fix. One scene-of a miai: a prenuptial family dinner-borrows heavily from Tanazaki's The Makioka Sisters, without Tanazaki's sense of an unfolding center. Ishiguro (A Pale View of Hills) handles Ono's dilemma better as something in the past, as memory, than he does when showing Ono in the here and now those sections tend to be static, too oblique. And partly it had to do with Ono's psychology, finding itself crushed by the riding tide of antihumane values rolling through prewar imperial Japan. Partly it was moral: the fear of art being turned into propaganda (as he saw happen with some of his fellow artists who became poster-makers for the war machine).

Partly the reason was political: an apprehension-abstracted from the way his fellow art students treated their teacher, their sensei-that blind submission to authority was too easily achieved.

But why Ono stopped painting, stopped the trajectory of his obviously very great talent, remains the central question. Thereafter, he lives a semi-tranquil life with his family-a wife, grown daughters, even a grandson-and seems to have made peace with his renunciation (although occasionally his ego still finds itself craving artistic recognition). Set in the years immediately after WW II in Japan, Ishiguro's novel bears down upon a Japanese painter, Ono, now middle-aged, who has totally renounced his art, who decided (some years before) to make no more.

An artist of the floating