Carole Maso's newly reissued novel The Art Lover, originally published in 1990, takes place within a year. Each chapter encompasses a season: Spring 1985, Summer, Fall, Winter, More Winter, and Spring 1986. But a year is only one of many parameters in the novel that are established, deconstructed, and subsequently remade into a dazzling prismatic world suspended in emotion. The demarcation between fiction, personal narrative, words, and art crumbles into the ruin of grief following death. Caught in the limbo of devastation, Carole Maso writes to make sense of this ruin, to accept the collapse of definition in her world. Her characters, herself included, are "speaking for [their] lives." Through this language, the reader follows Maso into a stunningly beautiful hell and out again, emerging devastated, drained, and ultimately exhilarated by a reality of breath-taking power and beauty.

Maso's work is above all an exploration of loss, one in which the author is as bereft of answers as the reader. This work is not a presentation or a statement, nor is it confined to a bounded fictional world. Faced with loss, Maso confronts grief directly—personally—and finds herself thrown into a world without rules or guidance. Floundering in the turmoil of a suddenly foreign environment, Maso uses art—her pen and the arrangement and deconstruction of images—to begin a slow and painful reconstruction. "It should be possible to do something with words," Maso writes. And do something she does. With a boldness that belies her confusion and fear, she creates two parallel stories, one of a writer named Caroline struggling with the death of her father and a dying best friend, the other of the family in the novel Caroline writes. A very vulnerable Jesus and a very remote God weave their way through both stories, followed by the character of Carole Maso herself, a woman watching the death of Gary, her best friend—the woman writing The Art Lover.

A picnicking family in the Berkshires—Henry, Maggie, and their two daughters Candace and Alison—introduce the novel in a dizzying panoramic shot of pinwheeling girls, salmon and fiddleheads, and an enormous starburst arch over the farmhouse door. Maso's language celebrates the sensuality of words, of a beautiful summer day, of warmth, and sky, and water. The idyll is soon shattered, however; Henry leaves his family for another woman, a loss that sends his wife and two daughters spiraling into different variations of shock. The characters, however, are only products of an imagination—one that produces stories and memories alike in fragmented, chronologically-scrambled pieces. They present a route into the mind of Caroline, a writer newly returned to New York to confront the sudden death of her father.

Maso's Caroline spins motives and images out of a world dominated by the invisible presence of her cultured art-historian father, the object of internal conversations and questions. "Why all these conversations going on in my head now?... What is the point of all this?" she asks. Why. Why death, why a world in which nothing makes sense any longer. The answers only a dead man can have, a man who, for all his success, had few answers of his own. And yet Caroline cannot help but look at the city—his city of "fire-eaters, jugglers, magicians, fortune-tellers, three-card montes"—through his eyes. When her best friend is diagnosed with AIDS, she plunges deeper into the maelstrom of loss. "Max, why didn't you mention that everywhere around you young men were dying? That you were living in a village of death inside a city of death." Not that she thinks Max will actually respond—she is really asking herself, a self that is imprisoning her in grief. She turns to her writing, to her fictional family of Henry, Maggie, and their two daughters, as a pseudo-Max, a vehicle that knows no rules and can therefore help her on her journey through the unchartered world of death and grief. When writing, she holds her pen "like a paintbrush sometimes. Sometimes like a staff. Sometimes like a weapon."

Which is exactly what Carole Maso herself does. As a medium of expression, individual words are selected as carefully as the actual reproductions of artwork that punctuate the verbal landscape. A Guerilla Girls poster, Vermeer's Head of a Young Girl, a New York Times illustration of an AIDS cell...every image engages language in a sometimes fierce and always iconoclastic dialogue. Rather than simply write about art, Maso injects art itself into the tapestry of ink marks—the products of her pen. And her pen tears at language as much as it embraces it; the boundaries between word, story, image, self, and fiction are swallowed and regurgitated into a new language of grief. Maso's own appearance in the novel is the culmination of a journey where a weeping Jesus converses with the fictional Candace while picking scarlet trillium and the "hieroglyphs of hope" are written in the language of HIV and AIDS. Like the reproductions of art, Maso enters the dialogue directly—not only as a writer, but as a character who is just as as lost and afraid as Caroline, Maggie, Alison, and Candace.

Lost and afraid Maso may be, but armed with words and with nothing further to lose, she takes risk after risk and writes her way through an emotional exploration both frightening and liberating in its intensity. Death is the only parameter within which Maso is confined, and AIDS, loss, and grieving her only specifications. Beyond that, she is free to use any tool—mental, emotional, or physical—in her repertoire. And so she creates an arsenal unbounded by genre or convention, expressed with her pen. The result is a harrowing redefinition of art. At one point, Maggie says, "One loves art more than life; it's better than life, don't you think? It doesn't disappoint so....It's not so frightening." Maso's art is an inversion of this statement. It is not better than life; it is the means of writing oneself out of death and into life. If anything, it is more frightening in its direct and unwavering confrontation with loss.

Yet there is something indelibly uplifting, even hopeful, in such a confrontation. Without mitigating circumstances, without external guidance or even a Jesus who seems less scared than Maso herself, she plunges into a city of red tinted AIDS wards, dead fathers and starless skies, and emerges. Not unscathed, not full of answers, but she does emerge, characters and scars in tow. Perhaps the greatest testimonies to hope are the words and images themselves. Maso's world of death is anything but stark or minimalist. It is a sensual world, filled with color and emotion, the world of pinwheeling girls, Vermeer paintings, and starbursts—the world as beautiful language in the face of incredible devastation. It is not a safe language. But with it, Maso creates a new grief-ridden landscape barren of certainty and definition, but buoyed by the possibility of creation and transformation.

Kara Riopelle is eagerly awaiting a Spring when she can pass the days hunting for fiddleheads.