Review: The Last Nude by Ellis Avery

By Ellis Avery. Riverhead, $26.

Ellis Avery's second novel, The Last Nude, reimagines the brief affair between 20th-century figurative painter Tamara de Lempicka and her muse and model, Rafaela Fano. As an uninhibited but naive 17-year-old American runaway, Fano is plucked off the streets of post-WWI Paris by the well-heeled aspiring painter and dropped into the city's socially complex art world. Given that Fano had scraped by in Paris as a mistress to a series of wealthy men, she is guarded when it comes to De Lempicka, until she feels her first pangs of real love. Though the older De Lempicka appears to reciprocate this ardor, her ambitions are such that she'll sacrifice anything to protect her social status.

Avery is an economic, unfussy prose stylist whose rendering of 1927 Paris makes for a fun and transporting travelogue. The author's effusive enthusiasm for era and place is palpable: James Joyce, Jean Cocteau, Josephine Baker and other iconic figures are present and accounted for. The bulk of the novel is told through the eyes of the young Fano, and Avery astutely captures a heady piece of history with an appropriately wide-eyed excitement.

The novel's second portion proves more problematic: Flashing forward to 1980 and continuing from De Lempicka's perspective, the book attempts to sum up 50 years of historical and personal history in 60 pages. The fact that the real De Lempicka's last painting was one of Fano suggests a Citizen Kane--style mystery regarding her primal feelings; The Last Nude's closing segment goes about elucidating some of the motivations behind the character's behavior, but the cluttered denouement feels imbalanced. If Avery had committed to brevity or expounded with the energy she did in Fano's section, it may have achieved a greatness akin to that in the paintings which inspired her.

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