A lively art-world drama that tackles grand themes.
A potentially valuable work of art generates familial animosity, legal drama, and political intrigue in this debut novel.
Nick Jaffe is a successful artist in his late 70s living in Sarasota, Florida, who’s inclined toward frothing diatribes about the shallowness of modern art—particularly its embrace of abstraction. He’s known for creating figurative pictures, which are generally regarded as beautiful, if unfashionable. Nick confides in Robert Ainsley—the owner of the art gallery that exhibits and sells his work—that he possesses what appears to be a painting by Ty Bromley that, if authentic, could be worth untold millions. In the 1960s, when Nick studied art in New York City, he was close friends with Bromley, but they had a falling-out over their conflicting opinions on the nature of art. Bromley later became a celebrity for producing precisely the kind of work Nick despised. The old artist remains maddeningly vague about the painting’s provenance, but he entrusts it to Robert for safekeeping, anxious that his own wayward adult son, David, might attempt to steal it. When Nick dies, he leaves all of his art to Robert, who, in turn, has the Bromley authenticated by experts. David stages an open war for the Bromley’s ownership, and as publicity around it grows, a nefarious Russian oligarch and a despot from a nation called El Pico make a bid for it, too. Meanwhile, Robert attempts to repair his broken marriage. Debut author Mann has conjured a deliciously eclectic drama that sharply satirizes pretention and venality in the professional art world. Throughout the novel, his knowledge of both art and the law is redoubtable—he’s a lawyer by profession—and his prose is self-assured and inventive; the Bromley painting even gets a chance to speak for itself in a chapter titled “First Painting Singular.” Undergirding the drama and high jinks is a serious consideration of what truly counts as art—or, more precisely, a presentation of the great debate about what it means for something to truly be beautiful. As a result, Mann’s inaugural effort is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking.
A lively art-world drama that tackles grand themes.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-979629-66-9
Page Count: 266
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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