The Story of Christina Olson--The Girl in the Grassy Field of Christina's World--A Novel

A Piece of the World by Christina Baker Kline
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Kline conducted many interviews with people familiar with the artist, Andrew Wyeth, and his model, Christina Olsen, forever captured crawling across a yellow field of grass, painfully distant from the farmhouse on the hill. Her face isn't visible, her arms are scrawny, her hair almost black. She is twisted at the waist in an impossibly awkward position, her arms holding her torso off the ground, her legs bent at the knees. One of her arms stretches before her, so it is obvious she is crawling toward that distant house and the observer of the painting searches, fruitlessly, the front of it, the area around the barn and other buildings, the stretch of grass between her and them for the presence of another person who might come to help her. The painting is, of course, the famous Christina's World and, though her dress is a lovely pink and her hair is youthfully blowing in the breeze, it produces a feeling of loneliness and sadness, of isolation and daunting hopelessness.

Here in the novel, Kline attempts to get into the person in the painting. She does not dwell at all on the relationship of artist and model, although she does suppose a kindredness of spirit between them. The book alternates between Christina's youth and young womanhood, in the early years of the twentieth century starting in 1896 ( a little 19th C but not much ) to about the 20's, and the mid-century until the finalization of the painting in 1948. She is only 55 years old then but you get the sense of a much older woman--I would have thought in her late 70's from the description.

From the start we are made aware of Christina's crippled condition. We first see her as a three year old and meet the parents and her siblings. From the start she is trying to do as much as all of them, refusing help so much so, she forces her father to take her home without visiting a doctor who might be able to help her condition. As the years go by she is given opportunities to escape the confining small town and isolated sea coast farmhouse but in one way or another she is prevented from taking advantage of them. The combination of place and her condition, which worsens as she ages, create the isolation evident in the painting. It also in time creates a bitterness which overwhelms her, causing pain to those few she keeps close and those she pushes away. In the end, it would seem, Andy's showing her as a young woman striving and enduring seems to finally give her peace for in it, she feels, he has captured her and, at last, she is truly seen.

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I received a copy of this book from BookBrowse in return for an honest review.

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