A version of the story of a famous sculptor’s relationship with an even more famous one, using an art buyer’s ability to enter the worlds of art as her genre hook
Camille Leray has a special ability, one invaluable to her work as an art historian and seller. Not that many would believe her, even if she told her secret, but she can go into a demiplane of the artwork she studies. She can get a real psychological and social sense of what the artist was thinking and doing and trying to convey, by means of the interiority of their worlds. But when her gift goes badly wrong, and she is forced to take a job at an estate in Brittany, her gift unlocks the secret and mystery of her favorite, underappreciated artist... but at a heavy personal cost.
This is the story of Sarah Jost’s The Estate.
The novel revolves around several interesting, interlocking axes. We have Camille, whose personal history, and her gift and her need for money after a disaster at the auction, leads her to the titular Estate where she spent some time during her childhood. Camille’s time there, as well as her relationship, in various meters with Maxime Foucault, the head of the estate, past and present, drive a lot of the social and psychological heft of the novel. Camille is more than a little in love with Max, and the working out of that relationship, and how it relates to her gift and her interests, is a lot of what you are going to find here. This does move the novel somewhat out of pure genre fiction (although the elements to be discussed below certainly are). A comp mentioned in the publicity materials, and what occurred to me as being a good one as I read this book, is Peng Shepherd’s The Cartographers. This novel does try to do with art history and art appreciation what that novel did with maps.
In keeping with the weight of the novel, and following that parallel, the mimetic elements really are strong here. We get a good third-person close POV look at Camille’s life, as her trip to the titular Estate brings up some good and some very bad memories in the process. There is an uncovering and unearthing process in the novel as we learn more about Camille even as we learn more about Maxime, his family in general, and more importantly their relationship with Constance Sorel, the focus of Camille’s artistic interest. Camille is a conflicted, interesting and engaging protagonist for most of the book (there is a later reversal that doesn’t seem well set up or paid for in advance that annoyed me). Besides Camille, a lot of the effort is put on Max, as well as his girlfriend Lila. The Camille-Lila relationship, as the novel goes on, becomes more and more central and important¹ to the culmination and denouement of the book.
So I should discuss the genre elements here. Camille’s ability to enter demiplanes that represent the interiority of an artwork and the mind of the artist is something that she herself does not quite understand and does not (as Maxime sees it) use to its fullest potential. The book begins with Camille thinking that it is idiosyncratic and singular; the inciting incident above that goes badly wrong is that she brings someone else into the demiplane with her by accident. As the novel proceeds, she finds out inch by inch that her ability is greater than she realizes. The exploration of this power is a secondary concern, and always takes a back seat to the mimetic elements and storyline.
There is a technique to determine whether a novel or story is fantasy or science fiction, and that is simply: if you remove the genre elements completely, does it still work as a story? By that test, The Estate very nearly succeeds. You’d have to make some alterations to make the plot work, get Camille to the Estate, and propel the rest of the narrative and why Maxime is so interested in her. So, without alteration, no, the work doesn’t quite succeed, but with some adaptation, it probably could. So The Estate sits inside the porous barrier between genre and non-genre work² but it is within the line. It’s just not a very *strong* genre-focused work. It was a bit frustrating to me in that regard, in that Camille is not only afraid to extend her ability, but she seems absolutely terrified, without any backing information, to actually explore it deeply.³
There is a lesser and somewhat underutilized genre element here, and that is Arthuriana. What some casual fans of the Arthurian romances may not know is that much of the work of the early versions of the Romances were composed and set in Brittany and not England at all. The forest of Broceliande was inspired if not taken to be Paimont Forest in Brittany, and to this day there are things like monuments and sculptures devoted to the French romance tradition of the Arthurian legends throughout the forest.
This gives a good grounding for Jost to use Arthuriana both in the demiplanes of Constance Sorel and in the works themselves. There is a definite theme of things such as the relationship between Vivaine and Merlin that come up time and again in the novel. A real appreciation for those early French versions of the stories infuses the work that Sorel does, and throughout the novel as Leray engages with that work at the Estate. There are intimations and not-quite-fully-formed ideas about mapping some of that Arthuriana onto Leray’s own life, but I don’t think the novel *quite* gets to where it is pushing for in that regard.
I’ve waited to this point to discuss the focus of Camille’s interest, Constance Sorel, in more detail. Aside from the original focus for her for Arthuriana, Constance’s is not imaginary at all, but is rather an alternate version of a real artist, Camille Claudel (the fact that Camille Leray has the same first name as her is, I think, absolutely no accident). Camille Claudel had an intense and tragic relationship with an artist you most definitely have heard of: Auguste Rodin (yes, the Thinker guy). Claudel was an artist in her own right, but her relationship with Rodin and her eventual confinement in a mental institution consumed the last decades of her life. Much of her work has been destroyed, part of it by herself. Hers is a tragic, heartbreaking story that recontexualized, when I first found out about it, my love of Rodin’s work.
In the world of The Estate, Constance Sorel had a relationship with an artist named “Boisseau” and the lines of that relationship are very clear: Boisseau is the better-known artist, a rockstar of sculpture. This relationship ended badly, and Sorel, like her model, wound up first in exile in Brittany, in the very estate that is the center of the novel, and then finally in an asylum.
The novel missteps with this, I think. We mostly get stories of the Boisseau-Sorel relationship and the power of their art. But the novel doesn’t seem to know whether or not these are an alternate Rodin and Claudel or not, and that hurts the story. We get a mention of Rodin once by name (Leray says she sold a Rodin not long before the start of the book), as well as a mention of The Thinker and jokingly “The Gates of Whatnot” (clearly The Gates of Hell). But I am still not convinced that the Rodin sale line isn’t a typo and that it's supposed to be Boisseau and that Boisseau in this world is Rodin and therefore, Sorel is Claudel.
The reason why this matters is that Rodin and Claudel’s relationship is never mentioned, even if Boisseau and Sorel’s relationship rhymes with it. If Rodin and Claudel existed in this world, for real, they would be a touchstone, a reference point, something for Camille Leray to hang her hat on and use. “Constance Sorel, as denied in her time just as Camille Claudel was, another woman deemed the mistress of a Great Man and whose art was denigrated and denied.” It’d be an obvious thing to mention and to think about. But this never happens, and with just one named reference to Rodin... it remains frustratingly unclear. And I think that is a real misstep.
My theory is that the Rodin line is a typo, and Rodin and Claudel don’t exist in the world of this book, but Sorel and Boisseau do.
The novel does additionally suffer, I think, for trying to fit Camille Claudel a.k.a. Constance Sorel onto the life and final fate of our heroine Camille herself. For all that we go through this journey of discovery of an artist’s true power, on top of all this, the novel seems to want to cast Camille Leray as a latter-day Constance Sorel, and Camille Claudel in the same breath, to the point of echoing Constance’s life and trying to give herself a better ending. Constance has a lifelong friendship that falls apart due to Constance being institutionalized (just as Camille Claudel was), but Camille Leray seems to be reaching for the same sort of friendship with Lila and succeeds. Instead of being pleased by the echoes and resonances, they instead seem to be an ill-suited frame fo Camille Leray’s life and fate that did not, for me, satisfy.⁴
I can hope that the book will bring more attention to Camille Claudel through her fictionalized version as Constance Sorel in the book, since her story is a tragedy (and sadly she destroyed much of her work). The thesis of the book, that Constance Sorel was an unsung genius of sculpture, appears to be the author talking about Camille Claudel’s work and place in history, and one that I can agree with. In the end, this book attempts to recapture and bring Claudel back to prominence through her fictionalized version and Camille Leray’s story.
So, if you are interested especially in art, particularly Rodin and Claudel, and don’t mind some not-always-well-used genre elements in a work that’s really about rehabilitating Claudel more than anything else, this is the book for you.
Side note: The Getty Museum and Art Institute of Chicago did a retrospective of Claudel’s work at the end of 2023. I wish I had known about it; it would have been worth a trip to Chicago to see.
Also side note: I did a Six Books with Sarah Jost in 2023, in connection with her book Five First Chances.
Highlights:
Strong story about a fictionalized version of an underappreciated artist.
Passionate and deep mimetic story about an art historian and her gift.
Not as genre as it might be, and not as effectively as it might be.
Reference: Jost, Sarah. The Estate [Sourcebooks Landmark, 2024].
POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.
I should emphatically note that it is not a queer relationship in any way, although, given my reading habits and expectations lately in reading a lot of queer-friendly genre work, I was *expecting* the slow-build intensification of Lila and Camille to go that way... but it does not.
People like the esteemed Gary K. Wolfe would say that there is no such barrier, having written articles and even a book on the subject. I’d love to know his take on this book in that spirit.
To take an idea from this. Suppose you had a door in your wardrobe to another world, be it C. S. Lewis, Seanan McGuire, or multiverse style. Would you poke your head through it, look at the world of the other side but never go further than a few feet from the portal, and yet still keep coming back and just repeating that same process? That’s how Camille feels like she has a relationship with her power. She doesn’t reject it outright, but seems to really limit any idea of trying other things for a lot of her life and a lot of the book.
So the Camille-Lila relationship is clearly meant to be an echo of Constance-Anne. The latter one is clearly platonic, and thus, as per footnote 1, the Camille-Lila remains strictly platonic, even if I read it coding as being potentially queer.
