Authenticity by Deirdre Madden

A delicate brush with darkness in Dublin

The publishers of Authenticity have taken quite a risk by issuing the novel with a masterwork on the cover: Nicolas Poussin's self-portrait of 1650. The title takes a further risk: authenticity is a moral as well as social concept. However, Deirdre Madden's book is a brave attempt to live up to the implications of its borrowed finery. It's a novel about painters and painting, the price exacted for following or nor following one's bent, and the battles with various kinds of darkness, including alcoholic addiction.

In present-day Dublin, Julia Fitzpatrick is the young conceptual artist who holds the events of the story in precarious equilibrium. Julia makes meaningful objects like an arrangement of leaves and mirrors and magnifying glasses in a box, working from a studio above an antique shop, where she's employed part-time. She has a cat called Max, and a lover called Roderic: 20 years older, an acclaimed abstract painter, ex-alcoholic, with an Italian wife and daughters in Siena, and a brother in Dublin, the mainstay of his life.

One day, Julia meets a man undergoing a crisis on a bench, and behaves compassionately. He is William Armstrong, a lawyer, would-be painter and emotional liability, who causes friction between Julia and Roderic. Roderic, the "real" painter, the Poussin de nos jours, is suspicious and uneasy in William's presence, displaying remarkable insight into the other's character. We may attribute this to his artist's clairvoyance – or to the fact that William is, in a sense, a mirror-image of himself, only someone whose dubious perspective makes him radically unsound.

Authenticity is about ways of seeing, and grapples with questions of artistic and everyday integrity, reserving its fullest approval for people who, like Julia's father Dan, are "completely themselves". The narrative moves backwards and forwards to fill gaps in the past and round out the present, before coming full circle in a very satisfactory way.

Some of its most interesting passages are meditations on painting, on how the "essence" of something is transferred to a canvas; or on the dangers of harbouring preconceptions in relation to art. It makes – crucially – a clear distinction between art-as-self-expression, not the real thing, and art detached from any ulterior concern.

This, her sixth, is Deirdre Madden's most impressive novel to date. She turns her back on a certain overwrought quality which disfigured her earliest fictions. It is confident enough to risk a joke or two, as when Julia is talking to William about the cat – "he's going to sit and sulk for the rest of the evening, the fool" – and he thinks she is talking to the cat about him. You feel there's a touch of pleasing self-mockery in the observation that "intelligent", "haunting" and "luminous" were words "frequently used to describe [Roderic's] work": these are adjectives frequently applied to Madden.

Her subjects are plain enough, from sectarian killing to a more generalised malaise. Authenticity marks a new departure, not only because its subject is more ambitiously framed, more densely realised, but because its evaluation of creative processes is astonishingly delicate and perceptive – not to say "haunting" and "luminous".

The reviewer's biography of Brian Moore is published by Bloomsbury in November