“I am tired, so very tired of thinking about Lacey Yeager, yet I worry that unless I write her story down, and see it bound and tidy on my bookshelf, I will be unable to write about anything else.”
This is how our narrator, Daniel Chester French Franks, begins his fictional manuscript that is the entirety of the novel An Object of Beauty. It’s a novel by Steve Martin, who you may know from his stand-up comedy, Saturday Night Live, his band the Steep Canyon Rangers, or his most recent success on the small screen, Only Murders in the Building.
An Object of Beauty is modern historical fiction. It takes place from the 1990s through the events of September 11, 2001, and the market crash of 2008. It’s all set in the world of art galleries and museums with the negative spaces filled in by collectors.
We follow Daniel’s main subject, his friend Lacey Yeager, through a variety of jobs from auction house, to gallery matron, and eventually gallery owner. Throughout, we are flies on the wall – in galleries, in museums, in collectors’ private homes, and even some restaurants – where art is discussed for its value as both an expression and a commodity. This isn’t something the layperson is accustomed to.
This access, through Daniel, is enlightening, to say the least. I’m not sure if Martin is speaking through Daniel with some of these generalizations about art, but they are all intriguing and worthy of more thought and reflection, things such as:
“You have the collector’s disease.”
“Not a disease. A disease makes you feel bad. I have a mania, an acquisitive gene. Pictures come through me like a moving train through a station. I only need to own them once.”
Lacey’s parents, Hart and Meg, were intelligent and cultured, two qualities that tide along effortlessly in households where the discussion of art is routine, though it’s difficult to tell which is the chicken and which is the egg.
When Christmas came, she went home to her parents in Atlanta and pretended that everything was fine. But now, away from New York, the idea of selling art after the apocalypse seemed frivolous. (This, if it’s not obvious, is from the first Christmas celebrated after 9/11.)
“I believe the last twenty years has been the most desperate search for artistic identity in the history of arts.”
Perhaps one of my favorite lines, which defines the book in it’s own odd way, is, “Art as an aesthetic principle was supported by thousands of years of discernment and psychic rewards, but art as a commodity was held up by air.”
There is something else about this book you need to know. The first is that while Lacey is the main character, our narrator and writer Daniel is never too far away. His own origin story as a writer hits a little closer to home than I’d prefer when he writes, “My goal, once I discovered that my artistic aspirations were not accompanied by artistic talent, was to learn to write about art with effortless clarity. This is not as easy as it sounds: whenever I attempted it, I found myself in a convoluted rhetorical tangle from which there was no exit.”
To me, this historical modern fiction may have one of the most unrealistic premises I’ve ever discovered in a book of fiction: a Fire Arts major using their art degree! I mean, I literally went to a small liberal arts college, and most of my friends and dorm-mates were art majors. While some of them still do art in their own time, none of them are actually in the arts as a full-time pursuit or have been in the 20 years since we graduated!
On that bombshell, I recommend this book to any and all Art majors. Whether you are now in banking, marketing, healthcare, technology, or anywhere else, this is where you could have been. It’s a fun, realistic look at a world that most of us will never set foot in.