... a marvelous feat of the imagination ... Goldberg conjures unseen photographs with astounding skill, describing a body of work that captures Lillian's era as readily as it speaks to the author's own. Art can be a dangerous endeavor for creator and viewer alike; the greater the response, the more effective the piece. Feast Your Eyes inhabits this tension with immense grace and empathy, challenging the perennial urge to stifle what doesn't conform to a given community's standards. The consistently ambitious Goldberg has once again delivered a remarkable piece of literature. Feast your eyes, indeed; there is much to digest.
...ambitious ... Goldberg’s passionate depiction of Lillian rings heartbreakingly true at a moment when discussions of emotional labor dominate certain sectors of the media ... At times, Goldberg crosses the slender line between clever and cute ... The constraints of the catalog form, hinging on descriptions of photographs we cannot see and Samantha’s labored contemplations of how Lillian might have composed them, grow tedious as the novel wears on ... Though the novel’s plot hinges on the obscenity trial, its most powerful moments arrive in the form of Lillian’s wrenchingly intimate reflections in her journal.
The faux catalog entries are the best parts of Feast Your Eyes ... Goldberg expertly differentiates the voices of the interviewees who help Samantha figure out who her mother was ... One of the big pleasures of the novel is Goldberg’s uncanny ear, which nails everyone from Grete, a Scandinavian-American friend with a wry sense of humor, to Nina, a bulldozerish gallerist who spearheads an obscenity court battle that overwhelms the increasingly unwilling Lillian and Samantha ... Lillian remains a frustrating character, too obtuse to see the damage she’s doing to her own daughter and too work-obsessed to understand how much she’s harming herself. For most of its length, “Feast Your Eyes” is a fascinating attempt to know a person we suspect is unknowable, but the best approach to reading Goldberg’s book may be to realize from the beginning that its shutterbug subject will forever remain a blur.
With cleverness and imagination, vivid historical detail and great heart ... Myla Goldberg ... has reemerged [from her publishing hiatus] with a stunning success, what feels like the book she was always meant to write. I certainly felt like it was the book I was meant to read—the first novel that has brought me to tears in a long time, out of the intensity of my involvement with its characters and concern ... By the time I finished this book, Lillian Preston seemed as real to me as any [feminist artist of the past], and I will remember her as long. Through its intense focus on a series of photographs, a group of quirky characters and a particular time in our cultural history, Feast Your Eyes becomes a universal and profound story of love and loss.
... brilliantly structured ... This is a novel of infinite depth, of caring authenticity both intimate and societal, of mothers and daughters, art and pain, and transcendent love.
The collage of impressions and reactions creates a holistic portrait that also allows Samantha and more secondary characters, like Lillian’s high school boyfriend, to reveal their own complexities. Lillian herself—selfishly single-minded in her artistic drive but genuinely protective of her child and often desperately lonely—is both larger than life and thoroughly human. A riveting portrait of an artist who happens to be a woman.
... Goldberg’s novel highlights the ways in which things have and have not changed for women artists. The book’s combination of voices (composed largely of the adult Samantha’s photographic descriptions and contextual narratives, excerpts from Lillian’s journals, and letters between Lillian and friends) serves to construct, appropriately, a curated version of Lillian. This is a memorable portrait of one artist’s life.
