This is one of my favorite books! Vreeland is an excellent writer. I bought more to share with my friends and to sell in my gift shop. I have a print copy of Luncheon of the Boating party hangin in my restaurant.

This is a pretty good book if you can get past the very slow start and the slow pace throughout. It is a historical novel about the creation of one of the world's most popular, lovely paintings as seen through the artist and the people represented in the painting. If you like Impressionism and a sense of history, you'll probably like this book. If you would like an idea of how a great piece of art comes to be, the thought-process, the techniques, this also is your book. If, however, you like fast-paced, dramatic action instead of a lot of drilling-down, this is surely not your book.

I was impressed by the atmospheric detail with which Susan Vreeland painted the people, place and time. Impressionism, representing a fleeting moment of time, was revolutionary and making its mark against the staid, traditional Salon paintings. The book, in fact, was written in an Impressionistic style, more about environment and mood than hard facts. It was interesting hearing the controversies surrounding the artists and their different camps. I also liked the author being able to create conversations and even thoughts in the principals. It's a great way to present a story - at least in my opinion. I enjoy Jeff Shaara's recounts of US history for the same reasons.

In a nutshell, if you like sauntering through a museum like I do, you might like to read this book. If so, and you have the chance, you also might like to go to the Phillips in DC to see this amazingly lovely painting; reproductions don't do it justice!

I thought the book was hard to get into. I know some French and still felt confused sometimes by all the French locations thrown around continuously. The characters seemed to ramble in their thoughts too much, especially early on. I hate to put a book down so I skimmed a lot and trudged through. It picked up midway. I enjoyed learning about the impressionist painting "movement" and found a new appreciation for that style of art. I really liked her Girl With a Pearl Earring, so I was disappointed by this book. If you are totally bored, pick it up.

It takes a lot of nerve for a novelist to revisit and deconstruct a major piece of art. The members of my book club had that reaction when we read Chris Bohjalian's The Double Bind, and I expect them to react the same way to Vreeland's take on Renoir, which we are reading now. Vreeland's book itself is anything but a work of art. But it helped me understand the painting better and appreciate more why Duncan Phillips and so many others consider it a masterpiece.

Let me start with the good news. Vreeland tells a good story; she offers a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. Somehow, being able to name all the characters in the painting and clearly parse their basic relationships with one another is more satisfying than many of the technical and historical details presented in the (excellent) 1996 Rathbone et al. Phillips Collection catalog, Impressionists on the Seine, that Vreeland cites as a major source. Vreeland brings Renoir's painting style to life, helping the reader understand, for example, the impossibility for Renoir of designing a painting with drawn lines of graphite or charcoal without considering what colors go where. She somehow places the reader between Renoir and his canvas, between him and the palette and brushes in his hands. She can describe his landscape and still life settings in language that evokes the feathery, sensuous strokes and contraposition of unblended colors that Renoir and Monet worked with--I can almost feel the color-forms that she describes on my body. She captures Renoir caressing the canvas voluptuously with his brushes as though he were physically touching his model.

But then human characters appear on the page, presumably with real personalities, real motivations and psychological experiences and, God help me, supposedly real dialogue and internal monologue. Arrrrrrgh! (as Aline might say) Show me, don't tell me! Put me in the moment that the Impressionists sought to live in rather than asking me to listen to an Acoustiguide curator tell me what he said, she said, he thought, she felt.... Put the footnotes out of sight; let the narrative grow organically from them rather than building it, fact on fact, like a paper-thin house of note cards. I feel like I am watching a biopic from the 1930s with a teenage Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney saying, "Let's put on a show!" Renoir hears Alphonsine suggest her terrace as the location for a painting and suddenly emotes, "Aha!! This is the answer to all my problems [which have conveniently just been laboriously laid out in outline form for the reader]. Let's make a masterpiece!"

This happens a lot. When Vreeland wants to acquaint us with Montmartre, she has Renoir and Paul Lhote wander from bar to bar, purportedly seeking Angèle to model in the painting, thereby giving us a Zagat's-eye guide to the bars. When she wants to acquaint us with "la vie moderne," while Renoir paints, she has one of the models, Circe, ask the other models, as true "flâneurs de Paris," what they have seen in the last week that embodies "la vie moderne" for them--this now a Zagat's-eye guide to Paris. When Caillebotte mopes around about the infighting among the founding members of the Impressionist group, we know he's hurting because he says repeatedly, in more or less the same words, "I'm hurting," and Renoir responds, again in more or less the same words, "Sorry, I'm moving on." And the agony of resolving the problems of the quatorzième and anchoring the painting, over and over and over.... Ugh! I'd rather get the Acoustiguide and let Eliza Rathbone herself just TELL me about Montmartre, TELL me about "la vie moderne," TELL me that Caillebotte was hurting as Renoir moved on.... This is not art.

And what about that rude, crude Angèle with a heart of gold, and that Jules, le très drôle Bardomatique? Yikes! In every scene in which they appear. They leave me embarrassed for the author.

Did you notice how I slipped in a few simple French phrases above? Vreeland taught me that. She inserts bits of French that allow a reader (like me) who vaguely recalls her high-school French to read them and experience the quick rush of "Ooooo, I speak French!" (Please, no one mention Thomas Dolby's "Air Head.") Sort of like peppy hooks in a pop song that you can't get out of your head--the simple frisson of them catches you unawares and you dance for a moment. Until you get tired of doing it, over and over and over. Is this story happening in French or English? Do these cute tourist phrases connote anything more than a doggie treat to reward an aspiring Anglophone reader (like me) trying to feel a bit closer to French culture?

So, fair warning. Don't ask too much of this book. It's not literature. It's not art. It is absolutely NOT, as USA Today apparently claimed "done with a flourish worthy of Renoir himself." Think teenage Judy Garland, not Émile Zola or Guy de Maupassant. As I got deeper into the book, Tom Wolfe came to mind--more journalism and travelogue than literature. But even taken as a journalist, Wolfe can give a scene a sense of depth and presence that Vreeland simply cannot. Take this book in the right spirit, as a simple, entertaining and informative, and often sensuous read. Vreeland taught me things I value about Renoir and his painting, and I thank her for that.

For readers seeking a more serious novel about the creation of visual art, let me recommend Joanna Scott's Arrogance (1990), in which beautifully written fragments slowly accumulate, like the lines in a drawing, into a multiple portrait of the master Viennese draftsman, Egon Schiele, and his friends.

This was one of the best books I've ever read. With all that France has had to endure, the French people are celebrated here through art, food and the love of the outdoors. Ms. Vreeland did an excellent job researching her subject. If you are not an avid art lover or Impressionist fan, you will be after reading this book. Renoir painted happiness and her book depicts this. Yes, the characters all brought their struggles to the table so to speak, but look at this painting - they are all having a good time. No matter how much hardship - people survive.

This was a great book club pick. Many in my club had no idea about art or this painting. They really enjoyed the trip into France and into a painter's life. It made for a great theme, too. It makes me want to go see the actual painting in Washington D.C.!