REMEMBER THIS

A playwright and his art historian daughter take divergent paths studying class and creativity.

Giardina’s sixth novel, following Norumbega Park (2012), opens in 2012 as Henry Rando is riding high on the success of a book about nearing 70, How To Be This Age. But a bestseller isn’t assuaging his flickering career in the theater or a sense that he needs to do more with his life. So, he joins a Catholic humanitarian aid group to Haiti, where he gathers play material and stirs up a well-cloaked homosexuality. Meanwhile, his daughter, Miranda, has quit her job at an auction house to write a biography of Anna Soloff, whose stark portraits in the vein of Alice Neel and Lucian Freud had her toiling in obscurity until becoming a high-dollar artist late in life. Through both characters, Giardina explores noblesse oblige, suppressed emotions, and the ways that money tends to muck with true art. (It mucks with Manhattan too: “The neighborhood had become the province of Art,” he writes of Chelsea. “And money, don’t forget money.”) For Henry, the fate of his inevitably mediocre Haiti-inspired play prompts him to do more than be a bystander; for Miranda, success means doing right by Soloff’s story while fending off the sense that the biography will do little more than up the artist’s market value. Fitting for a story rooted in upscale New York City with an eye on the past, Giardina writes with a genteel, Cheever-esque grace and charm. The style can be distancing, though, and the story lacks a certain body heat; there’s not a strong sense that, for these well-off characters, a lot is at stake, even when both of them hit a crisis point. Even at a low boil, though, the novel is a cleareyed study of how a scruffier Manhattan and clearer ethics gave way to a more compromised and machined world.

A muted and melancholy domestic tale.