A thoughtful, well-written, and well-developed novel about the art world that’s an exuberant, satisfying read.
In this mystery/thriller set in New York City, an art restoration consultant stumbles upon clues pointing to his grandfather’s possible association with World War II looting.
Once a Navy intelligence officer, 40ish Julian Peale finds a new job after recovering from shrapnel fire: he works at Medici Studios, a specialized laboratory for art restoration and research. As a restorer, Peale is still an apprentice, but his background in the Navy suits him for other tasks requiring more discretion, such as tracking down smugglers and forgeries. After a sting operation aimed at Russian smugglers goes awry, Peale follows clues to art fairs and auctions. But the trail becomes confusing, riddled with schemes from several fronts. John Saville runs an artists’ collective of young people happy to make some money through such shenanigans as forging works for the Russian market through their Russian landlord and art dealer, who is allied with London art world power couple Simon and Sonja Wilde. Their high-stakes plans rely on one of Saville’s mischief-makers, performance artist Dadaman, who takes his love for pranks a little too far, contributing to the knot Peale seeks to untangle. More important, Peale’s investigation uncovers information about his grandfather’s work as one of the Monuments Men in World War II, who were charged with restoring looted European art. In the process, Peale begins to find himself as a painter. The narrative offers reflections on anarchy, performance, appropriation, and creativity. Writer, editor, journalist, and artist Witham (Piero’s Light, 2014, etc.) provides a fast-paced mystery that’s bolstered by excellent characterizations, a deft back story, and insider knowledge of today’s art world: celebrities conceiving works while others make them; investors barely knowing what they’re buying; and the players hoping to make money or build reputations. Witham shows with admirable lucidity the Wild West nature of the art market, “home to the most unregulated flow of money on the planet after drugs and arms.” Readers also get a glimpse into Peale’s artistic process as he confronts the blank canvas and plays with colors, shapes, and ideas—an approach that provides an alluring contrast to the book’s joke’s-on-you prank artists. Underscored by Peale’s desire to redeem his grandfather’s memory, the narrative has some emotional urgency to go with its cleverness.
A thoughtful, well-written, and well-developed novel about the art world that’s an exuberant, satisfying read.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4808-2434-8
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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