Well-Beloved

Hardy's final novel follows Jocelyn Pierston, a sculptor who has spent four decades chasing an ideal. On the remote Isle of Slingers, he first encounters the woman he believes to be his destiny, a beauty who haunts his artistic imagination for generations. But when she ages, he finds himself drawn instead to her daughter, and later, her granddaughter. Each time, Pierston believes he's finally found the perfect embodiment of his vision, only to discover that the real flesh-and-blood woman never quite matches the dream. Hardy writes with devastating clarity about the gap between art and life, between the idol we construct in our minds and the imperfect reality that stands before us. Pierston's tragedy is not that he fails to find love, but that he is constitutionally incapable of loving what is actually there. By the novel's end, having watched happiness pass him by three times, he finds a strange contentment in compromise, a resolution both tender and quietly crushing. This is Hardy at his most autobiographical, anatomizing the distance between the ideal and the real with the precision of a sculptor who understands exactly what he's missing.