(courtesy Hardie Grant Publishing)
There’s something utterly beguiling about protagonists who don’t march to the beat of a conventional drum.
In a world addicted to the idea that conventionality and a certain level of self-censoring propriety are the only way to go, lead characters who break the mould, even to their own detriment, are a refreshing breath of the fresh air and the drivers of narratives that usually end up awakening all kinds of truths within us.
Painting Portraits of Everyone I’ve Ever Dated by Joseph Earp is in gloriously inappropriate possession of a wonderfully flawed and broken protagonist in acclaimed artist Ellie Robertson who careens through life, not in trainwreck fashion but not far off it in many instances, great at her chosen craft but really bad, or not as good as she could be, at being human.
It helps that Ellie is actually reasonably loveable.
Don’t mistake that for her not being maddening or exhaustingly unpredictable, all things her loving mum and dad or agent Madeline would agree would test the patience of a saint, but unlike other protagonists who end up more annoying than intriguing, Ellie lands on the latter end of that scale and you really want to get to know more about her.
Ellie, as it turns out, is actually a pretty decent person; she’s just someone who poured all her effort into becoming an imaginative and in-demand painter, but forgot that life exists around all the paintings you do, and art prizes you win.
‘I’m going to leave now,’ Ellie said.
Uncertainly and ashamedly, like a wounded creature only allowing itself to acknowledge its pain because it was about to die, the room began to applaud.
Painting Portraits of Everyone I’ve Ever Dated is all about, slowly and quite affectingly, and very humourously, filling in the blanks in very Ellie-like fashion.
Her decision, post huge art prize-winning to paint her exes leads, as you might expect to a heaping, helping huge slice of self reflection, told with razor sharp funny and inherently thoughtful writing that confirms Earp is not just a talented painter (which he is) but one of the freshest, most clever writers to come along in a while.
Almost from the get-go, Painting Portraits of Everyone I’ve Ever Dated sparkles with lines of witty dialogue and sagely funny observation that has you gasping in word-loving delight.
The conversations Ellie has with those exes, of both sexes, that agree to be painted, do not go exactly where you think they will; while there is some resolution of unlived moments from their shared pasts and some tidying up of the messy emotional landscape of their sundered relationships, this is not a therapy session where everything is neatly and tidily wrapped up.
That happens sure, but Painting Portraits of Everyone I’ve Ever Dated is less about some bright and shiny movie-of-the-week closure, and more about Ellie gathering a swag of home truths which she, of the heartily unexamined life, is loathe at first to even admit exists.
But admit to their existence, she slowly and hilariously and yet meaningfully does, and in so doing, fills the warm unconventionality of Painting Portraits of Everyone I’ve Ever Dated right to the gently anarchic brim.
(courtesy official Joseph Earp Insta account)
Full of spiky charm and really moving humanity, the kind that refuses to be neatly packaged and easily consumed, Painting Portraits of Everyone I’ve Ever Dated is the sort of novel that makes you realise how good writing can be and how freeing reading often is.
At every turn in a novel that loves one milligram of verve, wit or insightfulness along the way, we are treated to writing that sings off the page with an enthusiastic giving of the finger to any sense that we must always do what orthodoxy demands.
In so doing, however, the novel also robustly embraces, courtesy of a character who always wants to zig where logic and some trace elements of basic humanity might suggest you zag, the idea that there is a power to actually stopping to consider who you are, how you’re living your life and the ways in which that might be affecting other people.
That’s not why Ellie decides to paint her exes; like much of her life, it’s a throwaway idea, the artistic brainchild of an approach to life that loves the impetuous, the impulsive and the unexpected, which slowly takes on more emotional weight and existential power than Ellie ever intended to give it.
Half of the fun of Painting Portraits of Everyone I’ve Ever Dated, which has a lot of fun within (neatly balanced , it must be said,with a real affecting, emotional thoughtfulness) is watching how this “monster” which Ellie unleashes with a glib insistence that that IS her next artistic step, takes on a garrulously revealing life of its own.
They hadn’t even fought. Not one fight; not a single disagreement. Just the slow onset of this new stage of their time together, where nothing ever quite clicked, a series of almosts and about-to-bes that accumulated, one by one.
‘It’s not a criticism, it’s a poodle,’ Ellie said.
In the corner of the room, the record skipped.
Ellie is the queen of the unexamined life but suddenly deciding to paint her exes, and some other twists and turns in the fortunes of family and friends, force her do what she hates the most which is to take a good, long, hard, look at herself.
She’s not a fan, at first, but as Painting Portraits of Everyone I’ve Ever Dated moves on with a seductive mix of the serious and the witty, Ellie comes to understand in very real and sometimes, god forbid, moving ways that taking a second to work out where you’ve been and where you’re doing and who you might be in the messy midst of all that is not necessarily a bad thing.
It’s confronting for someone like Ellie, whom you will ADORE at every stage of her journey from emotionally messy and chaotically human to, um, well, less so is all we can say, to do this but it lends Painting Portraits of Everyone I’ve Ever Dated some real and lasting emotional heft in amongst its tightly written and sagely hilarious lines which never once lost their head of steam, not only in their capacity to amuse with sharply penetrating wordplay that cuts to the core of what it means to be human in a very Ellie-shaped (read relatably flawed) way but in their gloriously exciting of words to make merry with the English language and its ability to describe how it feels to live life when we’ve never thought properly about how it should be lived.