Sophie, a painter in her early 30s, is at a crossroads; she’s frustrated with her career, and her partner is pressurising her to have a baby. Enter a handsome local waiter, a beautiful friend who poses naked and a gorgeous Greek island backdrop, and rest assured, there will be enough bare skin to get the juices flowing.
But Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett’s novel has other, loftier aims, as its narrator-heroine also interjects ruminations on nude self-portraits by real-life female artists. This is a sex-on-the-beach cocktail garnished with a polemic on the female gaze.
Cossett, who cofounded the magazine The Vagenda, writes wonderfully. She’s obsessive about objects (a mansion is “all swirls and columns like a mafia bride’s wedding cake”) and terrific with catty swipes (“She was brittle to a degree that spilled over into unpleasantness, perhaps owing to the fact she had not won her status entirely on merit”). However, in weightier matters, the book feels a little dated; the signifiers of its feminism are Joni Mitchell albums and the novels of Virginia Woolf. “A flower crown,” Sophie muses. “It comes to us all, in the end.” It’s prettily put but also familiar, like something we might have heard in a Kate Bush song.
Sophie herself neatly ticks everything we expect from a Passionate Female Artist, and her (and Cosslett’s) views on art – so crucial to the story – are unsurprising. Tracey Emin “hums with sensual aggression”; Frieda Kahlo is a “feminist goddess, a rebel girl”. In fairness, Female, Nude does function as an easily ingested introduction to a fascinating subject, inspiring us to investigate, with more thoroughness, artists such as Paula Monderson-Becker, whose spectacular, brazen 1906 nude self-portrait is considered the first of its kind, and whose early death was commemorated in an elegy by her friend, the poet Rainer Marie Rilke.
READ MORE
Unfortunately, the radical nature of these nonfiction artists only highlights when the novel itself is silly; its white, well-off characters meet-cute over Edvard Munch, and the sexy waiter is (gasp!) also an archaeologist. Perhaps Female, Nude – which has bursts of lunacy and humour – would have been more subversive had Cosslett embraced its shallow fun. Instead, its serious intentions remind us that we are, in the end, reading about privileged girls with picture-perfect bodies. Under different circumstances, it might have been an enjoyable story, but its attempt to engage with the transgressive makes us wonder why we should care.
Mei Chin is a writer from New York based in Dublin
