[In the following review, Fairweather considers The Artist's Widow to be a disappointing novel.]

At some juncture in her lengthy career as a writer, Shena Mackay must have encountered the publisher's publicist from hell. For in her new novel, The Artist's Widow, Mackay sketches a vicious cameo portrait of Nancy Carmody, the glossy, publicist daughter of a Conservative MP who lost his seat in the 1997 election. More interested in her funeral clothes than the reasons behind the suicide of one of her authors, Nancy is described as a slippery eel while her philandering father is likened to a weevil.

Writing with what reads like personal bitterness, Mackay describes the branch of publishing to which Nancy belongs: ‘All those people with their fat salaries [who] have no conception of life at the other end of their industries. They take more holidays than hairdressers. They should remember who pays for their fine clothes. They pick people up when it suits them, make them jump through hoops and then toss them aside.’

Perhaps Mackay was put off the publicity game during the hoopla which accompanied the nomination of her previous novel, The Orchard on Fire, for the Booker Prize of 1996. Although she did not win, the novel—an intimate, touching and memorably funny evocation of a rural Fifties childhood—was widely praised for the authenticity of its voice and the brilliance of its polish. Readers coming to The Artist's Widow looking for more of the same lustre will be disappointed. In spite of Mackay's technical adroitness, this novel is much less alluring.

Written in the less intimate third person, The Artist's Widow draws a disparate group of Londoners into a plot which revolves slowly and uneventfully around an artist's widow called Lyris Crane who is also an artist in her own right. In her eighties, and rattling, increasingly breathlessly, around a large house in Dulwich, Lyris is potential prey to many of the parasites of the artistic world. Louis, an oleaginous Mayfair art dealer, knows how to humiliate Lyris in a hundred tiny, patronising ways. The exotic and coke-sniffing Zoe Rifaat wants to depict Lyris not as an individual, but as a type, by featuring her in a film she is making for Channel 4 about unjustly neglected women in artistic partnerships. And Nathan Pursey, her great nephew by marriage, who is pursuing a high-profile but financially unrewarding career as a conceptual artist, has designs on her money, her art collection and her house.

Through the absurd and despicable figure of Nathan, Mackay is able to parody the contemporary art scene where traditional craftsmanship and a true desire to communicate through the medium are overshadowed by the flashy installations and half-baked concepts of many of the artists who feature, for example, in Charles Saatchi's private collection. Nathan, who submitted a photocopy of his bottom in his degree show at the Chelsea Arts College and still came away with a degree, was catapulted briefly to celebrity when he discovered a sack of old cement in the backyard which looked like a felled sheep. ‘Dead Sheep’ went on to lead a contemporary art exhibition.

But when we encounter Nathan in the novel, he is on a downhill trajectory. Sophie, the most talented painter in his artistic collective (and the only woman), has decided to strike out alone. And he is reduced to masturbating on his childhood bed as he vacillates about whether his sister's old doll's house is simply a child's plaything or an ironic statement about contemporary life.

Although Mackay begins to develop some ideas about the relationship between the quality of an artist's work and the integrity of their personal character, the novel's biggest problem is that Mackay appears to have nothing to say. Lyris, questioning Nathan about his cultural milieu, insists that she needs to know about the Zeitgeist since: ‘Everything is remixed and recycled nowadays and I want to be able to take the references in some multi-media project.’ But as Mackay peppers her text with the full monty of contemporary cultural references—from Di and Dodi's high-impact death, to the Spice Girls (admittedly before the departure of Geri), and boy bands in general—it feels as though she is less concerned about capturing the spirit of the times and more about using style to disguise a critical lack of substance.

Perhaps Mackay was hurried into print by a publisher keen to capitalise on the previous Booker nomination. But it is a shame that The Artist's Widow falls short of her writing at its best, for there are moments in this novel when the reader is reminded of how good she can be. There is the dazzlingly original comic portrait (a welcome break in a novel short on laughs) of Jacki Wigram, the wigga (white nigga) who once passed herself off as a dread-locked half-caste, but has now had to acknowledge the full disaster of her Caucasian origins.

Although the novel focuses on the visual senses, it is the passages of acute olfactory observation, when a character's body odour is broken down to the last stale glass of wine and day-old dip in a bowl of hummus, which are most striking. And the ungrammatical description of Lyris's fear when Nathan enters her house stealthily, as uninvited as a mugger, will strike terror in the hearts of anyone who has ever spent a vulnerable night alone regretting the teenage years of horror-film apprenticeship: ‘Her heart thrashing about like a hooked fish: newsprint and television horror coursing through her brain while she sat paralysed, anticipating pain and even death: her body sprawled on the floor in a disorder of clothes.’