'The American Painter Emma Dial' by Samantha Peale

Emma's working her way through the list of paintings to be completed for Michael's spring show provides a convenient, thread-like structure to the novel. From "Spring Field with Police" to "Sea-shadow" to "Interstices (Rusted)," Emma's precision and skill sharpen the more she works; but her resentment builds to a crescendo. Peale is adept at capturing the particular grade of angst an artist goes through, simultaneously fearful of breaking new ground and withering without creative expression. "Honestly, I felt too . . . scared to paint," Emma says. "For years other people's pictures had composed my landscape."

It's not until Emma meets Philip Cleary, Michael's oldest friend -- and rival -- and a painter Emma has idolized since her art school days, that this landscape shifts. Philip sees not just Emma's potential to be an artist but straight into her soul. Their affair is the ultimate affront to Michael and it helps Emma break free of her mentor's hold, but not without creating new chokeholds.

Told in the first person, "The American Painter" is refreshingly devoid of gratuitous exposition or unwieldy sentiment. Peale's characters, instead, do the heavy lifting. They are robust and finely drawn. The author's writing is lean and powerful, with passages that cut to Emma's core and incrementally move the story into deeper emotional terrain.

If the novel suffers from anything, it is perhaps too much character definition, too many details. Michael is so stacked with innuendo he's almost a caricature. Reality may be getting in the way: Peale was a studio assistant to Jeff Koons.

Still, "The American Painter Emma Dial" is a more than impressive debut, with a complicated, vulnerable central character who's courageously living out the universal creative struggle. These are rich, ambitious ideas that Peale takes on -- questions of art and identity, commitment versus personal sacrifice, the precarious and charged student-mentor relationship, sexism in the art world, boundary issues of all stripes; she deep-dives into all this, yet her novel never feels heady or forced. Instead, it's a graceful personal journey, an intimate snapshot of a young woman at a seminal point in her life, on the brink of either discovering her true self or becoming unhinged.

When, at last, Emma is able to reconcile Michael and Philip's voices, something crosses over in her. "I was beginning to remember things. Hues. My arms passing over a canvas, a wide brush in my steady hand. The pleasure of my repeated gestures, making marks on sheets of heavy white paper. My voice. Saying yes and no. My will." American painter Emma Dial finally takes on the job of being an artist.

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deborah.vankin@latimes.com