A Piece of the World by Christina Baker Kline
"Later he told me that he’d been afraid to show me the painting. He thought I wouldn’t like the way he portrayed me: dragging myself across the field, fingers clutching dirt, my legs twisted behind. The arid moonscape of wheatgrass and timothy. That dilapidated house in the distance, looming up like a secret that won’t stay hidden."
To Christina Olson, the entire world was her family’s remote farm in the small coastal town of Cushing, Maine. Born in the home her family had lived in for generations, and increasingly incapacitated by illness, Christina seemed destined for a small life. Instead, for more than twenty years, she was host and inspiration for the artist Andrew Wyeth, and became the subject of one of the best-known American paintings of the twentieth century.
As she did in her beloved smash bestseller Orphan Train, Christina Baker Kline interweaves fact and fiction in a powerful novel that illuminates a little-known part of America’s history. Bringing into focus the flesh-and-blood woman behind the portrait, she vividly imagines the life of a woman with a complicated relationship to her family and her past, and a special bond with one of our greatest modern artists.
Told in evocative and lucid prose, A Piece of the World is a story about the burdens and blessings of family history, and how artist and muse can come together to forge a new and timeless legacy.
Review: In this novel, author Christina Baker Kline has written a fictionalized account of the woman pictured in the famous Andrew Wyeth painting entitled Christina's World. Born in the final years of the nineteenth century, Christina Olson's whole work is her family's remote farm in the small coastal town of Cushing, Maine. Increasingly debilitated by a then-unidentified disease that continues to reduce her mobility over time, Christina is confined to her childhood home and a small life. Yet she was made well known when she became close friends and muse for famous artist Andrew Wyeth, who painted scenes from around her family farm for more than twenty years.
This was a deeply affecting novel. Christina is such a strong, proud character who would rather drag her body across the ground than submit to the indignity of sitting in a wheelchair or accepting help from others. Perhaps even more crushing than her physical struggles is to see her dreams slowly diminish over the course of the novel. Christina falls in love and imagines a future as a wife and a home of her own. In a world spent solely on backbreaking chores made yet more difficult by her increasingly deformed body, the promise of this future buoys her: "But Walton's letters are hot-air balloons, lifting me out of melancholy" (146). Yet from the opening chapters where we see Christina still living at home alone with her brother, we know this love is not meant to be. Her bitter disappointment and violent rejection of the pity she sees in others' eyes made me really feel for her.
Christina is such a resilient and independent character. She tries to never complain and to carry on with what needs to be done, no matter how difficult that may be. The love story here is perhaps of one between siblings - of the deep bond of loyalty and devotion that Al and Christina share. Christina's story also emphasizes the importance of deriving what joy you can from small things. In the end, Christina must look to her cats, the physical beauty of her family home, and the joy of visitors to find some joy in her life. Kline has taken both the image and what is known about a real woman and created a strong, proud, and imperfect character. While very melancholy, I loved this story and the author's imagining of the woman behind the famous scene.
Stars: 4
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