The Review of Contemporary Fiction

When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth by Fernanda Eberstadt
Susann Cokal

Fernanda Eberstadt. When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth. Knopf, 1997. 404 pp. $25.00.

When Isaac Hooker meets the Geblers, he is just a step away from homelessness. Like most people in the world that revolves around Dolly and Alfred’s Aurora Foundation, he is an artist; but he learned to draw and paint in a New York City shelter, and his mental stability is questionable.
Once he’s caught up in Aurora, it seems Isaac’s troubles are over: he has a studio and a grant, and a much loved mistress in Dolly. She is an adoring, zaftig mother figure who uses the Foundation to hide her own deep unhappiness and sees Isaac as her salvation. For Isaac, art is the way to face demons; he pulls himself back from the brink of insanity by painting his childhood home again and again, then branching out into religious allegories such as the one that gives this novel its title: a representation of the mad, decadent times that preceded Noah’s Flood and the serene seas that replaced them.
Fernanda Eberstadt’s meticulously observed third novel is at its best and truly moving when it reveals not the pomp and pretension of the 1980s art world, but the pain of a middle-aged woman who has never been beautiful and who falls in love with a much younger man. Even philandering Alfred has some moments of astonishing pathos and revelation. It is difficult, however, to get a full sense of Isaac as a character; even when he is most lost his speaking voice belongs to an articulate critic, while his mental voice is more that of a wondering child. Though he becomes one of the art world’s darlings, he never seems truly at home in this novel’s crowded canvas. [Susann Cokal]