FICTION:ART YARN
An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin
Those classic “Saturday Night Live” skits are more than three decades old, but it’s hard not to keep thinking of Steve Martin as a Wild and Crazy Guy or the white-suited man with bunny ears. Who could have predicted the trajectory of that arrow that passed through his head, sailed through his platinum albums, his dozens of movies, his New Yorker magazine sketches, and now hits its target in a smart novel about the contemporary art market?
Like “Shopgirl,” Martin’s best-selling novella from 2000, “An Object of Beauty” tells the story of a young woman, but this time his heroine is ferociously ambitious and has “a scalpel personality.” With a killer body, a wardrobe to show it off uptown or downtown, and a sharp sense of humor, Lacey Yeager makes sure she’s the center of every room.
From her entry-level position at Sotheby’s, she beats, cheats and sleeps her way into the frothy art world, riding its peaks and crashes in the years before and after the 9/11 attacks. “She was rash with people, with her body, her remarks,” Martin writes. “She was equally reckless with all.” She’s so sure she can perceive and control invisible forces of desire that it’s hard to take your eyes off her, even when she’s standing next to some of the the world’s most beautiful paintings.
The person most thoroughly hypnotized by her performance is the almost-invisible narrator, Daniel Franks. In love with her since college, he’s Norman Rockwell to her Niki de Saint Phalle. While Lacey leaps ever higher in the gallery world, Daniel wistfully toils away as a freelance art critic, watching her soar along with the prices of ironic, deconstructive works by young artists no one had heard of two years earlier. On the opening page, he tells us that he’s writing down this story as a way of exorcising Lacey from his mind, but he only seems to be engraving her presence more deeply.
Bound on bright white paper, with splashy red endpapers, the text is enriched by more than 20 color reproductions of the artworks that catch Lacey’s attention, from Maxfield Parrish’s “Daybreak” to Richard Serra’s “Betwixt the Torus and the Sphere.” They make lovely, helpful enhancements to Martin’s always engaging discussion of these pieces, and how wonderful it is to see a mainstream publisher that knows a book can still be an object of beauty itself.
