From the author of Family History (“Poised, absorbing
. . . a bona fide page turner”—The New York Times Book
Review) and the best-selling memoir Slow Motion,
a spellbinding novel about art, fame, ambition, and family
that explores a provocative question: Is it possible for a
mother to be true to herself and true to her children at the
same time?
Clara Brodeur has spent her entire adult
life pulling herself away from her famous mother, the
renowned and controversial photographer Ruth Dunne, whose
towering reputation rests on the unsettling nude portraits
she took of her young daughter from the ages of three to
fourteen. The Clara Series, which graced the walls of
museums around the world as well as the pages of New York
City tabloids that labeled the work pornographic, cast a
long and inescapable shadow over its subject. At eighteen,
when Clara might have entered university and begun to shape
an identity beyond her sensationalized, unsought role in the
New York art world, she fled to the quiet obscurity of
small-town Maine, where she married and had a child, a
daughter whom she has tried to shield from the central facts
of her early life and her damaging role as her mother’s
muse.
Fourteen years later, Ruth Dunne is dying, and
Clara is summoned to her bedside. Despite her anguish and
ambivalence about confronting a family life she has
repressed and denied for more than a decade, Clara returns.
She finds Ruth surrounded, even in her illness, by
worshipful interns, protective assistants, and her conniving
art dealer.
Once again, she is Clara Dunne, the
object of curiosity, the girl in the photos. Except this
time she has her own daughter to think about—a girl who at
nine looks strikingly like the girl in Ruth’s photos—and she
yearns to protect her, to insulate her from the exposure
that will inevitably result when her two worlds, New York
and Maine, collide.
As Clara charts a path connecting
her childhood with her adult life, Shapiro’s novel weaves
together past and present in images as stark and intense as
the photographs that tore the Dunnes apart. A brilliant
examination of motherhood—a novel that pits artistic
inspiration against maternal obligation and asks whether the
two can ever be fully reconciled—Black & White
explores the limits and duties of family loyalties, and even
of love. Gripping, haunting, psychologically complex, this
is Shapiro at her captivating best.
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