I was on the Chinatown bus leaving Manhattan when I read about Sara Ehrenreich’s return to that same place. Sara, the protagonist and narrator of Jill Ciment’s new novel, The Tattoo Artist, returns to the city – courtesy of Life magazine – after being stranded 30 years on a remote South Pacific island and covered in tattoos.
All of a sudden, tracing Sara’s ride in reverse, the intense emotion of the fantastical turn of events felt real to me. Even more moving to me was Sara’s departure from her island home of Ta’un’uu: “I shouted that I’d be back before the full moon,” she recalls. “But no matter how many times I had told them I’d return, they still believed that I was leaving for the afterworld.” Though I was just leaving New York, I understood what Sara meant: that different places hold different lives, and moving between them can be as mysterious and irrevocable as dying.
“The Tattoo Artist” takes on themes of art, immortality, the soul, and the body with power and grace. Sara’s voice is at its strongest in her elegant, poetic abstractions and descriptions of the Ta’un’uu and tattoo art. It’s as a tattoo artist that Sara is most visionary, and as a narrator, her voice is at its most song-like as she describes her tattoos.
It’s in the more realistic passages that the novel becomes dry and, ironically, less believable. In the beginning, Sara is a typical of her early 20th century Lower East Side milieu: “For shopgirls like me, East Side Jews who spoke with guttural accents, the only lifeline out of workaday hell was the Educational Alliance, the center of Yiddish intelligentsia, a curious mix of night school, public forum, gymnasium, and revolutionary cells.”
It is at the Educational Alliance that she meets Philip Ehrenreich, an avant-garde American Jewish artist. Sara’s relationship with Philip pulls her into the bohemian 1920’s Greenwich Village scene. Her life becomes a less-than-convincing mass of all the art history book references you might expect: free love, psychoanalysis, absinthe, Diego Rivera. Sara emerges as an important Modernist artist herself, painting and producing a series of readymades, and Philip as a failed artist but a fine collector of primitivist art, including an en vogue collection of South Seas masks. When the Depression hits, he sells his masks to a Swiss millionaire and Sara and Philip depart for the South Seas to collect art.
Sara’s engrossingly rendered thirty years on Ta’un’uu pass, if anything, too quickly, over the course of the novel’s two central parts, appropriately titled “Gan Eden” (Hebrew for both the Garden of Eden and “paradise”) and “Body of Work.” Whereas Sara’s New York is studded with proper names, famous artists and streets, Ta’un’uu is a hazy, ahistorical dream of a desert island, complete with a people who assemble into a “Great Tapestry” of tattooed bodies. “We’d just spotted their tattoos,” tells Sara about her arrival on the island, “a turtle with human hands, stick figures in coitus, in prayer, in battle, an ark, a cockatoo, a praying mantis, a bolt of lightning, and abstractions that looked as if ants had been dipped in ink and let loose upon the body…The islanders stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the pink sand. When one of them shifted a foot or turned his head, or twisted in any way, the effect was of a great tapestry billowing.”
And Sara will eventually join this tapestry: her own tattoos, which cover her from the soles of her feet to her face and the surface of her tongue, tell the story of her life. While the novel can be patchy, dragging in places and gliding over whole narratives, Sara’s body tells the whole story. And her words show us where to look: “Or here at the base of my throat,” Sara recalls her first sexual encounter, “the etching for my union boy, a needle engraving a needle and, next to it, a harpoon for my Ta’un’uuan lovers.”
But who were those Ta’un’uuan lovers? Sara’s narrative romanticizes away a whole thirty years of her life, in a move that seems at first reverent but then laced with racism and condescension. She links Western culture, as exemplified by the Museum of Modern Art, with the “exotic” paradise of Ta’un’uu, but does not treat the latter with the same precision she uses on the former. While the novel does attempt to critique Western culture, the island chapters recall traditional Western portrayals of the Pacific Islands as a natural tropical paradise. In The Tattoo Artist, New York belongs to history and the South Seas belong to fiction. Which world do you prefer?
