Critique: "Perfection"

Critique of “Perfection”

“Perfection” is a story about a painter in the midst of a crippling identity crisis. The man lost his dominant hand in a car accident and, despite therapy sessions, can’t get over it. The protagonist, unnamed, is self-righteous and at times whiny. He paints self-portraits exclusively and is obsessed with his self-image. His ‘task at hand’ is replicating what he considers a perfect self-portrait that he painted before the accident. The main character’s two apparent relationships are with his mother and his therapist, who both urge him to move on from the accident. But he is ‘an artist,’ and stands by that title.

The story flows nicely, and moves between action and exposition fluidly. The final realization of his replica is gripping prose, and I particularly like the transformation of color and how it changes. A great deal of backstory is given through recollection, and through this the reader is informed of the protagonist’s conflicts with his mother as well as the accident itself. I wonder if there is a better way to bring some of these up, so the switching between the artist at work on his replica and the backstory don’t flounder in their quasi-formulaic approach: the repetition of certain words and phrases conjuring memories, along the lines of ‘this reminded him of this other time that is inconspicuously relevant to this narrative.’

The story ends in a suicide, which I think gives the story too much finality. It might be poetic with the knife and the whole perfect portrait narrative, but as a reader, I feel somewhat cheated when a character I have invested interest in dies at the end. Nothing is left to the reader’s imagination.