When the American photographer Vivian Maier died at the age of 83 in 2009, impoverished and alone, no one knew who she was. The 150,000 pictures she had taken on her beloved Rolleiflex during her lifetime – street portraits, mostly – had never been published; many of her negatives had never even been printed. But all that changed in 2009, when a collector who had acquired a portion of her archive put the images online. Ever since, she has been both a popular enigma and a celebrated artist, her photographs widely exhibited and increasingly expensive to buy. In 2013, she was the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary, Finding Vivian Maier, and now we find the bare bones of her life at the heart of a playful, tricksy and sometimes exasperating novel by the Danish writer Christina Hesselholdt.
The polyphonic Vivian, translated by Paul Russell Garrett, is delivered in postcard-size chunks of first-person narrative by a smallish cast of characters (some are fictionalised, others are not): in addition to Maier herself, we hear from those with whom she spent her transient childhood in the US and in France (her mother was French); from Sarah and Peter, a wealthy Chicago couple who employ her as a nanny; and from their daughter, her charge, Ellen. Also, more intrusively, from a “narrator” who elbows her way into the story at various points, sometimes to ponder the significance of this or that event and sometimes to ask whether or not her technique is working.
“I’m really not fond of documentaries with dramatised scenes,” this narrator writes late on in her book. “In dark moments, I think I may have strayed into this horrible genre.” She’s right about this, but perhaps not in the way that she means. In Vivian, the “dramatised scenes” in which different characters all describe the same, usually distinctly weird occurrence, from their own point of view, often work brilliantly. Hesselholdt inhabits them in a way that makes you feel as though she spent time interviewing them (Maier, incidentally, liked shoving a microphone in the faces of strangers almost as much as she liked ambushing them with her camera).
But her own voice is irritating and not only because her observations are frequently banal; having effectively cast a spell on the reader, she keeps breaking it and in a way that serves no real purpose. It’s a device that feels strangely old-fashioned: a postmodernism, flash but clunky, that seems to belong to another decade (the 1980s?) altogether.
Hesselholdt does not seek, particularly, to explain Maier; however tough and peculiar her childhood, it does not entirely account for her compulsions. (She was a hoarder; Hesselholdt has one of her employers reinforce the floor of her bedroom with a metal joist.) Nor, thank God, does she try to make her likable: her rudeness and tendency to hector and bully are fully on show. Nevertheless, it’s with her that you want to be. Sarah and Peter learn to be deft in their handling of her; Ellen, too, comes to understand that, as she is so stubborn and prickly, she must be treated with kid gloves, even by a little girl. There is magnificent comedy in the fact that she serves for dinner dishes (salted ox tongue) her non-European employers cannot stomach; that they spend their time wondering what, exactly, she keeps behind her locked door (newspapers is the answer). But there is something more purely satisfying about being inside Vivian’s head.
She knows that she is odd and yet she doesn’t know it at all. There is something sealed off about her; she cannot quite fathom other human beings – and it’s this, surely, that drove her to take so many portraits. The best of her work owes its veracity and spark to a split second of connection between herself and the stranger whose picture she is taking: she is a provocateur, uninterested in the question of permission – they are surprised, puzzled, indignant, furious.
Hesselholdt, poking her nose round the door again, reveals that at an exhibition of Maier’s photographs she saw in Helsingborg, she and a friend discussed how easily they tire of realism. She wonders, too, how Maier found the energy to take so many pictures, when the approach to her subject “was always the same”. I have two things to say about this. First, that I never grow weary of Maier’s work: its shadows and its tenderness, its curiosity and its pluck. Second, that I think Hesselholdt’s fatigue can be felt, with fatal consequences, in the pages of her novel.
As it goes on, it winds down dispiritingly. She seems not to know where to go with her experiment, either because she does not want fully to deal with her subject as an old woman or because realism is, for her, simply too exhausting a prospect. If she sometimes brings Maier vividly to life, this is all too brief and I can’t quite decide how it makes me feel. The mysteries that surround her are not (as if they ever could be) dispelled, which seems like a good thing. But this is no photograph album. It’s hard to imagine turning the pages of Vivian again. They have a fleeting quality: half-hearted and insubstantial, like images taken on a phone that you’re too lazy, or busy, to edit.
• Vivian by Christina Hesselholdt is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
