James Cahill is the author of the new novel The Violet Hour. He also has written the novel Tiepolo Blue. He has worked in the art world and academia for 15 years, and he lives in London and in Los Angeles.
Q: What inspired you to write The Violet Hour?
A: The Violet Hour is set in the glittering, treacherous world of high-end art: galleries, auction houses, extravagant parties, colliding egos.
In literary terms, it was inspired by various novels that observe a slice of life in a given society – whether Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now or something altogether more contemporary.
A direct inspiration was my own background in contemporary art. I’ve written about art as a critic for several years, and I worked for over a decade at a London gallery – so I have a dual insight. While the “art world” forms the setting of the novel, however, the themes of The Violet Hour are universal: loss, longing, desire, betrayal.
The inspiration, ultimately, was my entire life: people I’ve observed, the way that memory intrudes on the present. A lot of the story has to do with the inescapability of the past.
Q: The Daily Mail’s review of the novel says, “There’s something of F. Scott Fitzgerald about the way Cahill writes about the very rich. Cahill writes with an artist’s attention to color and detail, but also with an acute awareness of surface glitter.” What do you think of that comparison?
A: The novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald made a huge impression on me, growing up: I vividly remember reading Tender Is the Night in the library at school. The theme of longing – an obsessive clinging to the past, such as you find in The Great Gatsby – is one that’s central, I think, to my novel.
I loved that observation about the novel’s attention to surfaces. I’m fascinated by the literal and metaphorical veneers out of which life is composed – the look of a given place, or the façade that a person presents to the world.
As a novelist, of course, you have the ability to shift between the surface of a person and the hidden interior. In The Violet Hour, there’s a character named Thomas Haller – a renowned contemporary painter – who presents a highly crafted image of himself to those around him; but we soon learn that this image is a lie.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: The Violet Hour draws its title from a line in T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” (1922) – an epic-style description of twilight.
The image proves to be somewhat ironic, in the poem, because what follows is a dismally realist episode: a young woman returns from work to her lodgings, “bored and tired,” before her boyfriend shows up and forces himself on her.
In the novel, I was interested in creating a similar kind of slippage between moments of soaring beauty and abrasively real events.
On the very first page of The Violet Hour, you’re given a cinematic vision of a summer’s evening in London – but the tranquillity of the scene is abruptly broken when a young man falls to his death from a tower block.
More generally, the title reflects a theme of twilight or transformation. Each of the three main characters is at a transitional moment.
Thomas, the famous painter, is desperate to escape the “prison” of his fame. His oldest friend and onetime dealer, Lorna, has reached her own private impasse: her girlfriend is about to leave her. Thirdly, Leo Goffman – a real-estate tycoon in his 80s – is looking back at his life with a mixture of guilt and defiance.
Q: What do you think the novel says about the art world?
A: The Violet Hour has been described as a satire of the art world’s pomp and glamor, but if anything, I regard it as a realist novel. Nothing occurs in the story that couldn’t have occurred in real life.
And the characters, too, are real people in my mind – not caricatures or stock types. Even the most absurd or pretentious individuals in depicted in the novel turn out to have interior lives – take Fritz Schein, for example, a theory-spouting “super-curator” whose past we gradually gain a window into.
It’s also important to point out that The Violet Hour is a portrait of a certain kind of art world – international, moneyed, fast-moving.
David Hockney once remarked that there are many different art worlds, and I’m not claiming to portray all of them. Nor am I writing a straight-up endorsement. Certain characters remain very much on the fringes of the art scene; I’m interested in showing what it means not to break through.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’ve just finished a nonfiction book, The Beverly Hills Housewife, which will be published later this year. It’s the story of a single, seminal painting by David Hockney from 1967, titled Beverly Hills Housewife.
The book tells the story of Hockney’s love affair with Los Angeles in the 1960s, but moreover it recounts the extraordinary life of the enigmatic women (the unnamed “housewife”) whom we see in the painting.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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