In Brad Leithauser’s sprawling new novel, The Art Student’s War, Bianca Paradiso is enamored with light and color, as well as the vividly colored people that inhabit Henry Ford’s Detroit. Beautiful and sensitive, she is surrounded, and often beset, by family members, friends, and lovers. Bianca spends much of the novel struggling to interpret the impact of wooings and denunciations, deaths and births. Leithauser’s elegant prose traces her gradual transformation from a hungry and searching art student to a mature and discerning wife and mother.
When Part One of the novel, “The War Comes Home,” begins, Detroit’s auto factories are functioning as full-tilt armories. The Second World War is everywhere in Detroit—everywhere, perhaps, but the Institute Midwest, where Bianca is learning to paint. Early in her first year, she meets Ronny Olsson, the dashing son of a Detroit drug-store mogul. Opulently clad in a camel-hair jacket and “tawny suede hat,” Ronny offers impolite and insightful commentary on Bianca’s painting of an onion.
The two begin dating, and Ronny demonstrates an emotional and physical magnetism that is almost overpowering; Bianca is nearly undone by their first kiss:
The stroke of his tongue against her tongue threw a big voluptuous splash of color against the dark of her mind: an orange-gold glow that broke like a wave, tingling like one of those fireworks that die with such high reluctance against the sky’s velvet black … in the deepest Lascaux-cavern walls
