Poet Michael White's unusual and riveting memoir, Travels in Vermeer, opens in the midst of a nasty divorce and custody battle. Reeling, he flies to Amsterdam ("all I'd wanted was an ocean behind me"), and heads to the Rijksmuseum to see Rembrandts. But he is attracted instead by The Milkmaid, a tiny painting by Johannes Vermeer. The maid evokes a "tingling at the back of [his] scalp," and for the next 14 months, White chases the life-changing insights and soothing, healing effect provided by the Dutch master's small-scale, intuitive paintings, in which he sees expressions of love.
White studies biographies and art criticism about Vermeer, while visiting museums in The Hague, Washington, D.C., New York City and London, and sheds light as well on Vermeer's difficult childhood. While the artist occupies the bulk of this brief, eloquent book, a few scenes from White's battle with alcoholism and his tentative success with Alcoholics Anonymous round out a self-portrait sketched with great feeling in few words. Only a poet could communicate so economically, in language deserving of contemplatively paced reading.
White's descriptions competently guide even the most unfamiliar or untrained reader through an appreciation of the mechanics and mysticism of Vermeer's art. Readers will regret the lack of reproductions of the paintings under consideration; but, as he observes upon meeting Girl with a Pearl Earring, "reproductions are useless."
Travels in Vermeer is a thoroughly user-friendly piece of art education, but it is even better as a thoughtful, spare memoir of pain and recovery, unusually formatted and exquisitely moving. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia