There is a certain type of male artist (be he painter, writer, actor, or bassist) whose sexual excesses tend to be indulged and forgiven by the women in his life. And there are certain types of women inclined to indulge and forgive. Kate Christensen’s wise, funny new novel “The Great Man” (Doubleday, 305 pages, $23.95) is nominally about the former but actually about the latter.

The great man of the title, the figurative painter Oscar Feldman, has been dead for five years when the novel begins, and two rival biographers are angling to be the architect of his legacy. For decades, Oscar’s insecurities fueled his notoriously wide-ranging sexual appetite, which trumped creative expression as the primary impulse of his life. “Women were his real obsession, more than painting,” according to a longtime mistress, Teddy McCloud. He “couldn’t live without a woman around,” she recalls, and he pursued “every woman he met at an opening or on a train.” And what’s wrong with profligacy? After all, a lot of women liked Oscar back. His affairs were apparently constant and tacitly permitted by his wife. Even Teddy’s shy best friend Lila “yearned to lick him all over like a big lollipop.” Have I mentioned that Oscar’s only subject was the female nude?

To flesh out their portrait of the man, Oscar’s biographers intend to mine the recollections of the three women who knew Oscar most intimately, and on whom he leaned most heavily: Teddy, his mistress; Abigail, his wife; and Maxine, his sister and lifelong competitor for art world success.

These elderly women are the protagonists of “The Great Man,” and in her wry, candid voice, Ms. Christensen has done a fine job of sketching out their inner lives, where vivid memories jostle stilllively libidos. (Which are, yes, eventually stirred to action.) Here’s Teddy, thinking back proudly: “This air of expressive, confident intelligence, Oscar had told her, was one of the sexiest qualities about her, the electric flame that ran almost visibly soft and licking over her skin, hinting at interesting flare-ups. Then he had added that having incredible boobs didn’t hurt.”

Each woman describes Oscar with excellent recall, but though the facts agree, the opinions do not. While Teddy thinks Oscar “saw women as the most powerful beings on earth,” Maxine is more inclined to believe that “he metaphorically and, for all she knew, literally raped his models with his brushes” — even if she does have a certain grudging admiration for the finished paintings. What wife, mistress, and sister all share is the persistent, exhausting memory of the man — the impression his needy charisma left on their lives. Notably, the reader never gets any significant physical description of Oscar, though we do get the sense that he was quite ursine. One pictures a Julian Schnabel-like beast.

Although much bitterness toward the painter lingers (and there is talk among the women of details they’d prefer excluded from a biography altogether — a certain decades-old bet, in particular), all three women loved him, and Ms. Christensen uses the different ways in which they loved him to illuminate the women themselves. They’re each fussy and funny and distinct, but it’s Maxine who lives most vividly on the page.

Variously described in the text as a “warthog” and an “old tortoise,” Oscar’s sister is a cantankerous lesbian in her mid-80s who resents that her own mostly abstract paintings never received the same level of attention as her brother’s sensational nudes. (With grim glee, she tells one biographer that Oscar “had a very small penis.”) Nevertheless, she’s protective of her brother’s legacy and unafraid to fight for his name. No wonder, considering that her crankiness is “insuperable as an old toenail.” This is a woman who paints with a shark tooth instead of a brush.

“The Great Man” is not an astonishing novel, but it is a good one. Ms. Christensen understands the satisfaction a reader may take in being permitted to inhabit contradictory and mutually illustrative perspectives on a single subject, and she has an admirable willingness to offer up characters who, frankly, are not the most pleasant people around. The confident blend of nuance and crudeness with which she has rendered them, however, engages to far greater effect than anything as prosaic as likeability could.

Mr. Antosca last wrote for these pages on Doris Lessing. His first novel, “Fires,” was published by Impetus Press.