What I Loved

In 1975, art historian Leo Hertzberg discovers an extraordinary painting by an unknown artist in a New York gallery. He buys the work, tracks down its creator, Bill Weschler, and the two men embark on a life-long friendship.

Leo’s story, which spans twenty-five years, traces the growing involvement between his family and Bill’s – through the birth of their sons, the breakdown of Bill’s first marriage and the happy years of his second, when the two families live in the same building in SoHo and share a house in Vermont during the summer.

But the bonds between them and their wives become strained, first by tragedy and then by a monstrous duplicity, which comes slowly and corrosively to the surface.

Intimate in tone, dazzling in its scope, ‘What I Loved’ combines a sense of mounting menace with a superbly observed portrait of an artist and, above all, of relationships – parental, marital, erotic and fraternal. Moving seamlessly from inner worlds to outer worlds, from the deeply private to the public, from mental to cultural illness, it is a beautifully written exploration of love, loss, and murder – and a man’s attempt to make sense of the modern world.