Girl with a Pearl Earring
by Tracy Chevalier

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Book Reviews of Girl with a Pearl Earring

Book Review: A romantic historical novel of grace and power
Summary: 5 Stars

Novelist Tracy Chevalier has a gift for expression and a great talent for telling a tale and weaving into the fabric of her story the poignant details of everyday life. Somehow she makes those details and the acting out of the petty politics of domestic life utterly enthralling. Her first-person narrative of an illiterate girl charms and disquiets by turns. Although this may seem a far-fetched comparison, I was reminded of Mark Twain's Huck Finn, also illiterate, who nonetheless waxed poetic with not just a novelist's but a painter's eye for detail. The words they use are everyday words, but spun out so beautifully, so aptly that they become something close to poetry, all the while maintaining plausibility. In truth no maid nor elegant lady of learning could express herself so well as this girl, but that is the novelist's license, and Chevalier uses it well.

Griet has these choices: a butcher's son with blood under his fingernails; Vermeer, who has a wife and five children (and a sixth on the way); and van Ruijven, Vermeer's rich and lecherous patron, who also has a family. She cannot move to another city, although sometimes she vaguely expresses this childish dream. She, like the vast majority of humankind before the Industrial Revolution, was fated to live and die in the town of her birth. Her life was controlled by the choices she had in men; and what would become of her depended on how she handled those choices. She could not take a job and live alone. She could not abandon her poverty-stricken parents. She could only steer between the rocks and the shoreline, torn between her heart's desire and her good Dutch rationality. Thus, on one level, this is a disturbing tale of how people, especially women, were subject to the dictates of property and privilege, without real choice, working six days a week, from sunup to sundown, for subsistence wages in economic subservience to the privileged few. On another level this a Horatio Alger story of how one might, through hard work, right morality, a bit of clever common sense and--in this case--a pretty face, rise above one's predicament in life. Or, perhaps how one might try. This is also a tale of how our emotions lead us to ends both desirous and disastrous. Griet loves her master, as all good maids should, almost inevitably. Hers is a restrained and protracted love, beyond her control, so that she is caught. In this sense Chevalier's book is a romantic novel, a woman's interest tale of how the heart's desire may or may not be fulfilled. The beloved is a station above Griet; he is an accomplished artist, and he is taken--consumed in a sense--with his work and his large family, and yet she, as her brother points out, "wants him."

One of the nice things about this book is the reproduction of the celebrated Vermeer painting, "Girl with a Pearl Earring" on the cover. As one reads, one can easily refer to the painting again and again; and this is valuable because part of Chevalier's story is an imagination of how the work was painted through an intense study of the painting itself. Those in the visual arts I imagine will find this part of the novel fascinating, and may speculate on how closely Chevalier came to a truth about the process of artistic creation. Chevalier's interpretation includes the idea that the painting was the artist's way of making love to the girl. There can be no doubt of that.

I wish I could write with such grace and with such a feel for the felicitous detail and the absolutely apt phrase that is the hallmark of Chevalier's prose. I also wish I had the cunning to construct a novel so carefully. I knew I was in the thrall of a master as early as page nine when Griet learns that she is to clean Vermeer's studio without disturbing anything so that every object is returned to exactly where it had been. Chevalier has Griet remark: "After my father's accident we had learned to place things where he always knew to find them. It was one thing to do this for a blind man, though. Quite another for a man with a painter's eyes." Or, on page 163, Griet is home visiting her mother, and a "neighbor, a bright-eyed old woman who loved market talk," was there amid the rumors that Griet would appear in a painting alongside the lecherous van Ruijven. Griet tells her mother, "my master is beginning the painting that you were asking about. Van Ruijven has come over...Everyone who is to be in the painting is there now." Griet then observes that the gossipy neighbor "gazed at me as if I had just set a roast capon in front of her." Griet adds, "That will take care of the rumors."

Such skilled and subtle writing moves the reader along with a sense of deep involvement, and opens wide the eyes of other writers, who might learn from the very accomplished and gifted Tracy Chevalier.

Summary of Girl with a Pearl Earring

Girl with a Pearl Earring centers on Vermeer's prosperous Delft household during the 1660s. When Griet, the novel's quietly perceptive heroine, is hired as a servant, turmoil follows. First, the 16-year-old narrator becomes increasingly intimate with her master. Then Vermeer employs her as his assistant--and ultimately has Griet sit for him as a model. Chevalier vividly evokes the complex domestic tensions of the household, ruled over by the painter's jealous, eternally pregnant wife and his taciturn mother-in-law. At times the relationship between servant and master seems a little anachronistic. Still, Girl with a Pearl Earring does contain a final delicious twist.

Throughout, Chevalier cultivates a limpid, painstakingly observed style, whose exactitude is an effective homage to the painter himself. Even Griet's most humdrum duties take on a high if unobtrusive gloss:

I came to love grinding the things he brought from the apothecary--bones, white lead, madder, massicot--to see how bright and pure I could get the colors. I learned that the finer the materials were ground, the deeper the color. From rough, dull grains madder became a fine bright red powder and, mixed with linseed oil, a sparkling paint. Making it and the other colors was magical.

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