GOOD NEWS

A young woman flounders through art school and—more generally—her late 20s in New York City.

“What if Maggie’s life floated right past her? Just for a little while. Just for a year. Just for forever.” Brahme’s debut follows Maggie as she vacillates between her stalwart boyfriend, Rob, and her cosmopolitan ex, Rakib; somewhat listlessly works on her final painting, a massive depiction of women’s suffering; and hangs out with her brother, John, and his girlfriend, an artist who refers to herself only as “the Artist.” Maggie hopes to be nominated for a prestigious grant, and she both resents and admires the Artist, whose performances tend toward the ostentatious. If Maggie doesn’t win the grant, she’ll…figure something out. Brahme’s portrayal of Maggie’s unmoored state of mind is a particular strength of the novel, and she deftly describes the contemporary art world, as well as Maggie’s trepidation toward her Turkish immigrant mother and her relationship with her brother. But nearly all of Brahme’s secondary characters lack the well-rounded fullness of a complexly rendered person; they’re flat, two-dimensional. It’s unclear whether the Artist has been drawn in a satirical register or not; the book can’t seem to decide, and it wavers almost as often as Maggie does. And while Maggie herself is a sympathetic enough character with her competing, irreconcilable desires, the prose can be plodding and occasionally borders on trite (“so much was always happening that things happening began to seem overrated”). The book is strongest in its depiction of the many ambivalences and equivocations of smart, talented young women—but in the end, it doesn’t offer much of note beyond the most conventional of bildungsromans.

A deftly rendered but flawed portrait of an artist as a young woman.