Since writers of fiction are creators themselves one would think that they could easily invent convincing portraits of artists. Yet this is hardly the case. Too frequently the writers, composers and painters depicted in fiction seem oddly removed from their work. Though they may spring to life as people and though their work may take on a certain reality, their actual involvement in the process of creation rarely comes across. (p. 706)

Eva Figes's short, carefully measured novel Light records one day in the life of Claude Monet at his beloved Giverny, and one of its chief virtues is that it makes believable the artist's immersion in his art. Here there is no question of distance; from the beginning of the book the artist and his cause are bound together…. During the course of the book Figes only briefly describes Monet in the actual process of painting. In fact, though his presence is always felt, Monet himself appears only intermittently. Much of the novel focuses on his family and friends, gently exploring their characters and moods and differing responses to their cloistered little world and its strange, revealing, almost oppressive light…. Although Monet is often offstage, Figes so firmly establishes his impressionistic, light-filled world, constantly and inventively noting the effects of light on rooms and objects, on the painter's precious gardens and lily pond, that we become party to his obsession: his subject is everywhere.

By concentrating on the play of light at various instances, Figes does in prose what Monet sought to do on canvas: capture fleeting images and colors, moments in time. This method of identifying with an artist's goal by rendering the world in his individual style seems to me a unique way for a writer to portray a painter. (pp. 706-07)

Figes's focus on the subtle transformations light works on objects and landscapes points to the general sense of change and passing time that affects, to various degrees, all the characters. She further links that process to the gradual passing of an era. Even in the quiet, removed Giverny of 1900, signs of the modern age are evident….

Tightly structured and framed, meticulously following each character from dawn until dusk, Light is also virtually plotless. These features, along with its illumination of small moments of being, recall the late fiction of Virginia Woolf, though the book lacks Woolf's complexity, her quiet intensity and poetry. At times, Light seems too schematic and studied, with Figes straining to give symbolic weight to mundane matters. And at times I wondered whether the real Monet would have been as concise and academic in his observations about his art as is the fictional artist. (p. 707)

Taken as a whole, however, Light is convincing and effective, and in its closing moments surprisingly touching as well. The single star, the "pinprick of pure light" that appears in the darkening sky at the end of the book, recalls the star that Monet observed at the beginning. And as day fades into night and light dissolves, we feel, along with the characters, a growing solitude, an odd sense of loss, as if the world as well as the creative spirit were suffering a kind of temporary death. (pp. 707-08)