Self Portrait With Boy, Rachel Lyon
In her debut novel, Rachel Lyon brings to the fore a question that has plagued photography for years – a question tackled by Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others. What does it mean, she asks, to capture tragedy? Is there a difference if the capture is a moment of (un)fortunate happenstance? How does the photographer decide how to present their work? And are they an artist showcasing a moment of disaster, or are they a human exploiting the dead and the mourning?
After taking a photograph of the moment her neighbours’ son falls to his death outside her window by chance, Lu Rile finds herself trapped between the desire to use the photograph to boost her struggling career, and her burgeoning friendship with the boy’s mother, Kate. Set against the backdrop of an evocative New York City in the early 90s, amongst social and political changes, Lyon effectively weaves together the threads of poverty, ambition, and what we owe to the people around us to paint a portrait of artistic struggle.
Lu Rile is a typical young artist searching for her big break in New York, and her complex decisions are at once deplorable and understandable; her moments of heartbreak remain sympathetic in a novel that threatens at any moment to turn the reader against her, and to create a world in which Lu is a villain. Lyon manages to keep these moral questions in play ambiguous enough that, despite the initial unlikability of her protagonist, the atmosphere she creates allows for a great deal of recognition; a canvas of sorts appears, upon which any young artist is free to consider what they might do in Lu’s place.
At times, the novel feels a little too long. The slow development of Lu’s relationships with other characters such as Kate, the mourning mother, and her own father, is effective but becomes somewhat tired as the novel reaches its later stages. Nonetheless, Lyon has captured a very particular brand of page-turning excellence. It is a novel about art that turns the lens on the reader and confronts them with a picture of a dead boy and the simple question: What would you do?
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