Girl with a Pearl Earring 
Girl with a Pearl Earring centers on Vermeer's prosperous Delft household during the 1660s. When Griet, the novel's quietly perceptive heroine, is hired as a servant, turmoil follows. First, the 16-year-old narrator becomes increasingly intimate with her master. Then Vermeer employs her as his assistant--and ultimately has Griet sit for him as a model. Chevalier vividly evokes the complex domestic tensions of the household, ruled over by the painter's jealous, eternally pregnant wife and his taciturn mother-in-law. At times the relationship between servant and master seems a little anachronistic. Still, Girl with a Pearl Earring does contain a final delicious twist.
Throughout, Chevalier cultivates a limpid, painstakingly observed style, whose exactitude is an effective homage to the painter himself. Even Griet's most humdrum duties take on a high if unobtrusive gloss: I came to love grinding the things he brought from the apothecary--bones, white lead, madder, massicot--to see how bright and pure I could get the colors. I learned that the finer the materials were ground, the deeper the color. From rough, dull grains madder became a fine bright red powder and, mixed with linseed oil, a sparkling paint. Making it and the other colors was magical. In assembling such quotidian particulars, the author acknowledges her debt to Simon Schama's classic study The Embarrassment of Riches. Her novel also joins a crop of recent, painterly fictions, including Deborah Moggach's Tulip Fever and Susan Vreeland's Girl in Hyacinth Blue. Can novelists extract much more from the Dutch golden age? The question is an open one--but in the meantime, Girl with a Pearl Earring remains a fascinating piece of speculative historical fiction, and an appealingly new take on an old master. --Jerry Brotton
Reviews
Upon picking up Chevalier's novel, I thought it might be slow and boring. Thankfully, despite the delicate prose, the novel moves along at a steady pace and at times the novel is so silent and intense-like a cat on the hunt- I had to hold my breath. The novel is the perfect length and Chevalier skillfully mixes character, art, plot and 17th century Holland into a tight novel.
Chevalier's novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring, is the literary analogy. She describes with exquisite sensitivity, and yet with the minimalism one might expect of Hemmingway, the ambiance of a Dutch society where stoic restraint dictates silence, and where social control is achieved with knowing glances and unspoken understandings. She describes perfectly this country were even the Catholics are Protestant in their severity. And yet one where the deepest affections shine through the austere light.