The Vivisector

In this prodigious novel about the life and death of a great painter, Patrick White illuminates creative experience with unique truthfulness.

Hurtle Duffield loves only what he paints. The men and women who court him during his long life are, above all, the materials of his art. He is the Vivisector, dissecting their weaknesses with cruel precision: his sister’s deformity, a grocer’s moonlight indiscretion, the passionate illusions of such women as the sugar heiress Boo Davenport, and his mistress Hero Pavloussi, wife of a Greek shipping magnate. Only the egocentric adolescent he sees as his spiritual child elicits from him a deeper, more treacherous emotion.