This latest from Rachman (The -Imperfectionists) follows the life of Charles (Pinch) Bavinsky, son of narcissistic painter Bear Bavinsky. A mid-20th-century phenomenon, Bear falls out of fashion once pop art and postmodernism take hold, leaving a string of ex-wives and children in his wake as he continues to coast on his fame and ego without producing any more work. The unassuming and middling Pinch, in awe of Bear and wishing to accomplish something to impress his father, fails as a painter and academic. He fails as well as at romantic relationships and ends up as a language teacher in London. Not until late middle age does he discover a path to self-actualization and a form of power and success. Presenting a life chronologically has fallen somewhat out of fashion, but Rachman demonstrates the power of this sort of storytelling. Without the distractions of flashbacks and multiple narrators, Pinch's trajectory slowly builds momentum. Seemingly insignificant events and conversations take on great import years or decades later, and readers will take pleasure in the discoveries. VERDICT Along with the skewering of art-world and academic pretensions, there is humor, humanity, and compassion in Rachman's writing. For most fiction readers. [See Prepub Alert, 9/25/17.]-Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

In his poignant latest, Rachman (The Rise Fall of Great Powers, 2014, etc.) examines a life dominated by someone else's art.Pinch worships his father, noted painter Bear Bavinsky, although Bear's behavior amply justifies the warning of Pinch's stepsister Birdie, daughter of the wife discarded for Pinch's mother, Natalie: "Everything's always about his art....He doesn't hardly care about his actual creationsthe human ones." By the time Pinch is 15 in 1965, Bear has moved back to America from Italy and on to a third wife and more kids (eventual total: 17). Stuck in Rome with the increasingly unstable Natalie, Pinch desperately wants to stay connected to his elusive father. Rachman perfectly nails the charm with which Bear cloaks his selfishness and keeps his needy son both at a distance and firmly under his thumb. Bear skillfully deflects Pinch's plea to come live with him by saying it wouldn't be fair to Natalie and passes a devastating judgment on the boy's fledgling paintings: "You're not an artist. And you never will be." Pinch goes to college in Toronto, planning to become an art historian and write his father's biography, and it seems this will be the story of an impossible parent destroying a vulnerable offspring, especially after Bear sabotages Pinch's first serious love affair and Pinch winds up teaching Italian at a Berlitz-style language school in London. But the balance of power between them shifts over the years in Rachman's subtle rendering. Bear's reputation goes into eclipse, and he confides the unsold paintings in his remote French cottage to Pinch, whom he trusts to protect his legacy. The way Pinch claims some turf for himself while remaining entangled in Bear's shadow leads to an ironic conclusion that also shimmers with love and regret. Pinch's best friend and late-in-life lover, two of the novel's many finely rendered secondary characters, drink a rueful toast to a man who refused to be anyone's victimexcept maybe his own.A sensitive look at complicated relationships that's especially notable for the fascinatingly conflicted protagonist. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

THE ROMANTIC IMAGE of a genius who is at best self-absorbed and at worst plainly monstrous in private life is familiar from countless biographies of painters (writers, composers, directors). The annals of art are iittered with abandoned women, neglected offspring, heartbreaks and betrayals. Yet Gauguin, after deserting his family, went on to paint his celebrated landscapes of Tahiti, and Picasso - who fathered four children by three women, juggled mistresses and wives, and helped drive two of them to suicide - forever changed the face of modern art. Morality and immortality, it must be acknowledged, do not necessarily go hand in hand. In fact, the opposite often seems to be true: To achieve real mastery, the artist must be obsessed with work, fiercely protective of his time, ruthlessly selfish in his dealings with those who would impose upon him - all the small, needy people who ask for crumbs of his soul yet ask in vain - for all of it, undivided, is laid on the altar of Art. Such a Great Artist, the capitalization almost palpable, is the subject of Tom Rachman's engaging and subtle third novel, "The Italian Teacher." In the opening scene, the aptly named Bear Bavinsky appears to his adoring son as a magnificent giant who, rising from his bath, leans on the 5-year-old for balance, making the boy tremble under his weight. Like many a subsequent episode, this feels both vividly realistic and effortlessly symbolic, foretelling the unbalanced relationships within the family, the man ever a dominant, expansive, larger-than-life figure who will continue to cast his shadow on numerous successive wives and progeny. (We learn the exact head count of Bear's children only at his funeral; Picasso, who may have served as the inspiration for a few plot peregrinations, had nothing on him.) Painted in bold, convincing brush strokes, Bear strides through life with confidence and vitality, joking, scowling, smoking pipes, spreading his mood, "the man's pleasures clapping you on the shoulder," charming and impregnating young women, discarding them as they get older, mussing his children's hair, feeding his children's hopes, crushing his children's dreams and always thinking about, talking about, breathing art. Art is not, however, the focus of Rachman's novel. To be sure, art lovers will find a steady scattering of treats - anecdotes about Giacometti and Picasso, aesthetic judgments (Correggio and Renoir are reviled, Dürer and Soutine admired), pithy aphorisms ("Success in art is 50 percent timing, 50 percent geography. The rest is talent," a cynical dealer says), and snapshots from the art world, from the elegant Roman gatherings of the 1950s, where "the moneyed all speak of art, the artists all speak of money," to the auctions at the turn of the millennium, where Bulgarian crime bosses and Malaysian baby-bottle billionaires snatch up critically sanctified masterpieces. Yet such glimpses are oblique, and profound insights into the nature of artistic greatness are not on offer. While Bear's genius does not seem to be in doubt, we are given a rather one-note, not to say gimmicky, impression of his work: His wildly colored paintings are all extreme magnifications of this or that body part, "a bare throat filling the huge canvas, or a roll of tummy fat, or a pricked shoulder"; significantly, his portraits never once include a subject's face. Yet Rachman appears in perfect control of his material. This is not an aesthetic treatise but, first and foremost, a morality tale about fame and family, "the long, loud effect of fathers." For Bear Bavinsky, while unquestionably the book's central presence, is not, in fact, its protagonist. It is his son, Charles "Pinch" Bavinsky, whose much more obscure life we follow in its chronological unfolding, from childhood to old age. Pinch's mother, Natalie, a struggling Canadian potter, is Bear's third wife, living with him for a decade before being deserted for a new family. Insecure, solitary, unattractive, Pinch loves his father with a fierceness that veers uncomfortably close to worship, and, post-abandonment, he will spend years trying to impress the absent man. As an adolescent, he harbors artistic aspirations of his own, "imagines enduring in history, a major painter, he and Dad recalled together," but Bear, with casual cruelty, dashes his ambitions in an understated yet gut-wrenching scene. "I got to tell you, kiddo," he says. "You're not an artist. And you never will be." Crushed, Pinch turns to art history, styling himself as "the future critic of renown" who will become famous for writing the definitive biography of Bear Bavinsky. Yet this dream, too, comes apart in due course, not without Bear's heavy hand in the debacle, and Pinch steps out of his father's spotlight and slowly fades into adulthood, his life a modest existence of a language instructor at a London school - the slyly ironic "Italian teacher" of the title. Pinch's middle years, and the middle of the book, are meandering and seemingly plotless, filled with sadness, disappointment and tenuously formed and lost connections. Yet the quiet story remains engrossing, by turns gently humorous and pathetic, mundane and poignant. Unlike his father, Pinch leaves few traces, forms few attachments, sires no children. Rachman's gift for characterization, on full display in his first novel, "The Imperfectionists," seems oddly underused here, for the characters are fewer, less defined. Apart from Bear, the only figures who stand out in Pinch's surroundings are his mother, the tormented woman with her own ruined dreams, and his best friend, who has a penchant for pastel scarves, scandalous opinions and hard drinking. This lingering vagueness sounds a curious echo to Bear's faceless paintings, almost as if Pinch sees the world but dimly, blinded by the glare of his father's personality, by the light of his father's art. Indeed, Bear's presence or absence remains the shaping force of Pinch's existence well into his later years; but as he ages, the question of his acquiescence, of his volition, begins to hover more and more insistently. Is Pinch really as oppressed by his father's overbearing (pun intended) will as he appears? Or is he largely culpable for the ending of his mother's life, the collapse of his one meaningful love affair, the fate of his father's legacy? As "the grizzled legend," already in his 80s, nears death, the story quickens, bringing the themes of posterity and accountability to the fore. How precisely are reputations made? What separates the immortals from "the billions whose inner lives clamor, then expire, never to earn the slightest notice" - how much of it is luck, how much personality, how much talent? And does talent give one the right to trample others? Bear himself believes so. In an explosive confrontation at the heart of the book, the father says to his son, "You work for me." The aftershocks of this emotional eruption ripple through to the end, bringing upheavals and reversals in their wake. As the hour of reckoning draws nigh, the ironies grow thick, and the eventual dramatic resolution feels somewhat forced; while some readers may see a heartwarming message here, I, for one, found it highly ambiguous and not a little horrifying. Yet so apparent are Rachman's humanity and intelligence throughout that this ambiguity must be fully intended. There are no black-and-white answers in life and art, not even in our present age of increasing personal responsibility. "The Italian Teacher" is a psychologically nuanced pleasure. ? It's as if Pinch sees the world dimly, blinded by the glare of his father's personality and the light of his tirt. OLGA GRUSHIN is the author of three novels, including, most recently, "Forty Rooms."

*Starred Review* As the son of renowned artist Bear Bavinsky, Charles, aka Pinch, has always struggled to find his own identity. His father is a legend, a hard-living, opinionated, philandering raconteur whose impact on the world of fine art is in direct relation to his obsessive and strategic secrecy. Bear burns any painting he deems unworthy, thus elevating in value and allure the few works that make it to the public eye. As the father of countless children by numerous women, Bear is as cavalier in the role of parent as he is overprotective of his paintings. Thus, it is highly significant that Pinch alone remains in the old man's orbit, even as he tries to emulate his father's talent. Unceremoniously rebuffed on the one occasion he shows Bear one of his paintings, Pinch retreats to a lackluster career as a language teacher while surreptitiously creating his own body of work. When Bear dies and leaves his estate in an uproar, Pinch embarks on a scheme that will either destroy or protect his father's complicated legacy. Rachman's (The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, 2014) haunting addition to the list of novels about children overshadowed by famous parents is a momentous drama of a volatile relationship and the fundamental will to survive.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2018 Booklist

In Rachman's artful third page-turner (after The Rise & Fall of Great Powers), the son of a world-renowned painter struggles to escape the dark shadow cast by his father. Born in Rome to a mistress turned bride, Pinch Bavinsky only sees his domineering father, Bear, during the elder's summer visits to Europe. After a trip by teenage Pinch to 1960s New York ends with Bear crushing his artistic ambitions, the son abandons his dreams of painting to embark on a failed career in academia before becoming a foreign language instructor in London. The most trusted of Bear's 17 children, Pinch appoints himself overseer of his aging father's work, and much of the novel's well-staged tension emerges from Pinch's choice in the early aughts to paint a reproduction of one of Bear's paintings and sell it, passing it off as one of his father's. Spanning the 1950s to the present, the novel does traffic a bit in familiar notions of the art world and difficult artists, but its subversion of these tropes makes for a satisfying examination of authorship and authenticity, and a fine fictionalization of how crafting an identity independent of one's parents can be a lifelong, worthwhile project. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.