I feel like Hustvedt is a really great way to make everything else one has read recently seem childish and ill-informed. The basic plot of this novel, told after the death of the main character through testimonies and historical documents, involves a female artist showing three major installations using the names of three male artists. You’d expect a bit of gender theory in the mix to prove the author had done her homework, but Hustvedt joins the dots from Milton and Emily Dickinson through Mill, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, encountering Husserl and the Freuds and not omitting Aunty Madge, the Duchess of Newcastle…plus plenty of others I’d never heard of. None of it seems like showing off because it’s a reflection of the heroine’s energy and zeal for information, though the footnotes did start to wear me down. My only other complaint is a brief moment of metafiction which felt like the author indulging herself (and after all, it IS her book). Otherwise an intriguing and meaty read, which manages to be cerebral while sending out a primal howl of anger and frustration.