“It’s a self-portrait,” Iphigenia said. “It’s a portrait of Ula, young, maybe even a teenager, holding an infant. It’s called Self-Portrait with Nothing.”
I’ve seen Self-Portrait with Nothing shelved as Sci-Fi or Fantasy, but it’s really a bit of light Mystery with a twist of magical realism: Pepper Rafferty is a thirty-six-year-old academic and forensic anthropologist — working at the university on archaic remains and with the police on fresh ones — and hers is a loving and stable life, supported by her two moms and the husband she married seven years earlier. When Ula Frost — a famous artist from Pepper’s hometown — is reported missing, a strange connection between the two women, and a threatening group on Pepper’s heels, will propel Pepper from clue to clue on the reclusive artist’s shadowy trail across Europe. Like a mix of Recursion, The Da Vinci Code and The Picture of Dorian Gray, with a nod to the Bones novels, debut novelist Aimee Pokwatka has written an interesting and engaging story. Pepper and her husband, Ike, are wonderfully and believably fleshed out, but if I had a complaint, the rest of the characters are just kind of props (some cartoonishly so) for Pepper’s story. The magical twist isn’t really explained (it’s just accepted, but is it necessary?), and while Pepper follows a series of puzzles, codes, and clues, I wouldn’t really call this a mystery. With a background in anthropology and an MFA, I reckon Pokwatka is going for literary fiction here, and while Pepper does come to some conclusions about life and its meaning, there’s nothing very deep or revelatory here. Still, easy and entertaining, I was happily propelled along. Slight spoilers beyond here. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
When Pepper couldn’t sleep — at least since she was fifteen — she imagined the alternate universes that might be out there if alternate universes really existed. A universe where antibiotics had already stopped working. A universe where cancer had a cure. A universe where that man had never become president and started that war, and all the people who’d died and the cities that’d been destroyed still lived and stood perfectly intact. A universe where she hadn’t met Ike in the hotel lobby of a conference about the evolution of human sexuality. A universe where they’d met but hadn’t skipped out on the conference in favor of drinking hurricanes at the hotel bar and ended up in Ike’s room shortly thereafter. A universe where they’d broken up that time she told him she couldn’t see herself married instead of staying together. A universe where the pregnancy scare had been an actual pregnancy, and now they had a couple of kids, and two dogs and a cat, who was the boss of them all, and it was chaos and she mostly loved it.
Pepper has long been intrigued by the idea of alternate universes — and drawn to the idea that her life might be playing out in better, happier ways elsewhere despite having what looks like a happy life in this one — so she has also always been intrigued by the rumours about Ula Frost’s paintings: Apparently whenever she paints a person’s portrait, the subject’s doppelgänger is summoned from a parallel universe, with generally unhappy results. But that’s just a rumour, right? When Ula goes missing and presumed dead, and Pepper is for some reason named as her executor, a threatening visit from The Everett Group sends Pepper after a trail of breadcrumbs that may or may not turn her world upside down.
There was something very engaging about Pepper’s character: I liked how serious she was about her work, the interesting backstory of being raised by two moms (partners in life and a veterinary practice), her believable relationship with her husband Ike. And I liked that Ike was a fellow academic: an historian who seemed most interested in women’s stories (while Pepper is travelling through Europe, Ike is exploring and sharing the diaries of a single woman who travelled with a wagon train along the Oregon Trail). Their phone and text conversations — sometimes friendly, sometimes impatient — were believable and relatable. But no other characters were really fleshed out (the moms and a police officer are introduced early, and they seemed really interesting, but aren’t really revisited), the mystery aspect wasn’t really intense (we just follow along with the clues), and I still don’t know if the magical paintings (or cartoonish bad guys) were necessary for Pepper to come to the following conclusion:
In every universe there was still plenty of uncertainty and grief, and kindness and anger and suffering and joy, beautiful things and miracles and tragedies that knocked people on their asses, there were mistakes and forgiveness, second-guessing and the question of what else might be out there — all constants in every universe, all existing at the same time. Pepper felt the innumerable universes around her, and then she let them go.
Still: This was a breezy read with much to like in it. No regrets.
