The Underpainter
Review published with Great Lakes Review
One text that has become almost ingrained in my literary consciousness of the connection between fiction and the Great Lakes region, from a Canadian perspective, is Jane Urquhart’s 1997 novel, “The Underpainter.” Published by McClelland & Stewart and winning the Governor General’s Award for fiction that very year, “The Underpainter,” pushed me irrevocably into a creative space of becoming more enthralled with the depiction of nature in literature and nature-language employed as metaphors of our relationships to nature, and to each other, in a textual landscape. “The Underpainter,” cemented Urquhart’s profile in Canadian society at the time as a prominent contemporary Canadian author who has become a classic and known for her literary theory, poetic language and richly layered historical fiction.
The story follows the narrative point-of-view of the character, Austin Fraser, who is an American artist, an underpainter, scouring landscapes of Lake Superior and becoming entangled with the lives of those connected to these geographies over a time period of seven decades. “The Underpainter” has been revered as a novel of power in prose, an expert in craft of the depiction of landscape and deemed Urquhart’s most prominent novel to date. Further, a novel that boasts one of the most powerful climaxes in contemporary fiction.
As Fraser travels the geography of Lake Superior, I was drawn to the reclusive woman he meets at Silver Islet, a remote mining community along the lake, who is a waitress in the hotel he stays at. Urquhart sculpted an image of this woman, Sara, and her connection to nature and the lake for me as a young Canadian reader of rich characterization and mystique that propelled me as a writer to deepen my own work in orienting to my geography.
Fraser’s own interpretation of the lake in his narrative and orientation to his painting, enraptured me. As an underpainter, Fraser’s technique essentially was an erasure of the figures he first painted, layering over them with a palette to function as an extension of how he treats the people in his life, utilization of their presence as a necessity for his art, while remaining emotionally distanced to ultimately abandon them or make them disappear.
His connection with the lake was an act of painting itself in the richness of prose. Observing the lake from his window, he notes, "through the window, the lake was a sheet of beaten metal, shifting with the wind, reflecting the sky’s moods with an unsettling precision." The lake shapes his creative and artistic expression. "The light off the water altered everything, made colours seem sharper, edges more defined—until fog arrived and smudged the world like a careless brushstroke." And, the heartbreaking plotline of a woman who wanted to love a man who painted the very nature she cherished, tricked her into perceiving that this man connected with the lake like she did, as an extension of it. "She stood on the shore of that great lake, a figure as removed from me as the land itself." Fraser was never going to open up fully to the world around him, the lake and the woman distanced from him, he led her to believe, in becoming her lover, that a deeper love could be cultivated and nourished there.
Sara ends up dying alone and is abandoned by Fraser. The reader is not given direct access to her point-of-view, but must work to glean and peel back the layers of her throughout the novel. Inevitably, it is her fate that hooks the crux of the novel’s climax. This plotline and these character arcs are also a sediment of critique for the novel. Fraser was deemed cold and distant, unlikable. To me, that was the very point of the poignancy of connecting with the novel and feeling immense reaction to it. In the end, his artistic ambition also leaves him isolated and questioning his life choices and how he treated those in it.
I first encountered work by Jane Urquhart in a Grade 12 English class with her novel, “Away.” This novel changed the course of my writing life as her depiction of Irish folklore and roots in rural Ontario overlapped with my own personal geography allowing me to see something of my potential in current literature. Urquhart was born in 1949 in Little Long Lac, Ontario. Since then, she has become an iconic novelist, poet and essayist in Canadian literature. She studied at the University of Guelph. Major works include “The Whirlpool” (1986), “Away” (1993), “The Stone Carvers” (2001), “A Map of Glass” (2005), “Sanctuary Line,” (2010) and “The Night Stages” (2025). I have read all of these texts and come to realize this review is in fact a celebration of the canon of an author and not necessarily a recommendation of a single piece.
In contributing to the community and voice of the readership of Great Lakes Review, I highly advocate that entering into a Canadian voice of the representation and engagement of the Great Lakes region could begin with Jane Urquhart. In shifting the scope of this review to our current political and economic climate, let a regional landscape connect us through art to appreciate the bodies of historical societies who orient to landforms more ancient than human-made structures of our time. Go read Jane Urquhart, please.
