The Great Man

The Great Man is a novel by the American writer Kate Christensen, published in 2007. It takes place five years after the death, at seventy-eight, of the painter Oscar Feldman, who is the great man of the title.

Feldman was a New York painter of the generation that came up in the forties and fifties. Where his contemporaries painted abstract canvases, he painted one subject over and over, the female nude, and he made his fortune doing it. When he died he left a wife, Abigail, a son who has autism, and a sister, Maxine, who is a painter of note herself.

What the obituaries did not include was the separate life he had led in Brooklyn with a mistress named Teddy, with whom he had twin daughters. The two biographers who are competing to write about him turn to Abigail, Teddy and Maxine for information, and the novel is what those three women make of him and of each other.

Christensen won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for the book, which was chosen from nearly three hundred and fifty submissions.