Book #132: An Object of Beauty

Title: An Object of Beauty
Author: Steve Martin

There's so much about Object of Beauty that I love: the education of how the world of fine art dealing works, the inclusion of relevant artworks in the text, the way the story sucked me in and had me reading even when we had company and I should have been entertaining them, and the way that Steve Martin is just a freaking genius in the breadth of things he does well.

The story reminds me a little bit of The Great Gatsby, in the sense that there's a vibrant, larger-than-life, amoral central character living a privileged life among the New York elite (in this case, Lacey Yeager, who starts her career as a backroom girl at Sotheby's and rises to owning her own gallery in Chelsea). This story is also told by a not-quite-central character, Daniel, an art writer and college friend of Lacey's who lives on the sidelines of the story (and is privy to details that he couldn't possibly know unless he'd been there, which might bug some readers as far as point of view goes) and has a minor role in her underhanded move to the big time (you could probably even call her a modern-day bootlegger). However, although Gatsby and Yeager are similar in many ways, Gatsby's so charming that the things that happen to him feel tragic rather than deserved, while I felt that Lacey deserved everything that she got (is it gender bias?). In some ways, the book reminded me of Jonathan Frazen's Freedom, because Lacey was almost as unlikeable as his characters, but I felt that An Object of Beauty was ultimately more satisfying than Freedom because of the world that Martin created.