The Jump Artist by Austin Ratner: review 'My book is not a biography so much as an artistic tribute to Philippe Halsman - more like a portrait or a sculpture," declares Austin Ratner in the author's note at the start of his debut novel, The Jump Artist. Which feels right, having finished it, because this isn't straight historical fiction with its fetishisation of period detail and neither is it a dramatised life in the mould of a television biopic. The Jump Artist is more ambitious than that; it's stranger, more impressionistic, less concerned with the verifiable facts of the obituarist's stocktake than it is with other deeper, novelistic truths. Occasionally this ambition thwarts the narrative but it's still an absorbing read, not least because its protagonist's life was so extraordinary. Philippe Halsman was "the Austrian Dreyfus," a Latvian Jew falsely convicted twice of patricide in Twenties Innsbruck. Ratner deftly recounts this period by focusing on Halsman's second trial, using the courtroom procedure to anatomise the known facts, but also Austria's already virulent anti-Semitism. His case attracted international attention and he was later pardoned on the condition he left Austria for France, where he mixed with the country's bohemian avant-garde before the Nazi invasion forced him on to the United States, where he became one of the century's great photographers. Echoing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ratner's style evolves as his character does, so that it gets more interesting as he ages, but also - unlike Joyce's masterpiece - plainer and lighter. There is an overwrought sensitivity to Ratner's teenage Halsman that would have had even Young Werther rolling his eyes. This impressionistic portrait-like approach allows him to do interesting things with the blurring of the real and the imagined, and licenses him to focus on some seemingly inconsequential incidents, but it has its weaknesses, too. His style, for example, can be a little rich and he would have been well advised to have paid heed to Henry James's maxim "Tell a dream, lose a reader." All told, however, this is a debut full of promise. Halsman would later become famous for his portraits of people jumping, which he believed unmasked them, exposing their hidden selves. Ratner's novel is a fitting tribute.