“Girl with a Pearl Earring”, by Tracy Chevalier

 

233 pages, Perfection Learning, ISBN-13: 978-0756904913

First, my confession: I saw the movie Girl with a Pearl Earring before I read the book Girl with a Pearl Earring, so I was hardly shocked by anything inside (well, a little; read to the end). It has to be stated that this is a conjectural novel; I know, I know, I know; all novels are conjectural, even a novel – like this one – that is based on actual people and true events. So, what is this about, then? Okay, here we go: Girl with a Pearl Earring refers to the painting of the same name by Johannes Vermeer, painted sometime round about 1665. That’s the factual stuff; now, for the conjectural: 16-year-old Griet goes to work as a maid in the household of Johannes Vermeer, a painter with a good local, but no international, reputation. The tale is in no hurry to get going; Griet lives for two years – two years! This is glacial storytelling at its best – at her employers’ and is only allowed to visit her home on Sundays, where life goes on and things change and the world turns…really, couldn’t you speed things up a little, Tracy?

Griet is increasingly fascinated by Vermeer’s paintings, and the artist discovers that Griet has an eye for art – no doubt due to her father’s trade as a tile-painter – and secretly asks her to run errands and perform tasks for him, such as mixing his paints and acting as a substitute model. Griet arouses the suspicions of Catharina, the artist’s wife, but Vermeer’s mother-in-law, Maria Thins (an interesting person in her own right), recognizes that the girl’s presence has a steadying effect on her son-in-law and connives at the domestic arrangements that allow her to devote more time to his service. Eventually, after a lot of soap-operatic intrigue and slow-as-molasses-in-January plotting, the young Griet is finally granted immortality when Vermeer makes her the girl with the pearl earring and paints her portrait, after ages of wading through this book.

As I said, I saw the movie first and thought it your typical Masterpiece Theatresque costume drama: not bad by any stretch, but moving to its own rhythm, which was sssslllloooowwww. Well, guess what? The movie followed the book very closely in that, plodding along as if something is about to happen but never really does and the domesticity of everything adds nothing to the tale and goodgoda’mighty will something happen PLEASE. Griet is a rather pompous, priggish young woman with an overinflated sense of her own position in society and far too calculating for the persona she is supposed to be, but at least there’s something there, as nearly everyone else was without any substance. Vermeer is very cold, almost mute, and there is no clue to his thoughts at all; he just comes and goes as if he’s in a trance. Catharina, his wife, is one-dimensionally nasty; while the children, Griet’s family and the other maid are stock characters (the bully, the good child, the baby, the threatened co-worker, the poor but proud parents, etc.). About the only real personalities are Vermeer’s mother-in-law (I actually liked Maria Thins best; she seemed to have some three dimensionality) and the butcher’s son who courts Griet.

I’m sure it must be difficult to make art interesting, to describe on paper the creative process and what goes on in the artist’s mind as he is working, but Chevalier doesn’t even try: describing one non-event after another does not a novel make. Not a bad book by any stretch, just rather pointless.