The Architect

An architect persecutes his clients for crimes against good taste in a surreal debut novel that is a sendup of the world of high-end design.

In an off-kilter 12-step program, a group of shellshocked faux aesthetes recount their victimization by a godlike figure known only as “The Architect,” an egocentric designer of acclaimed avant-garde houses. The Architect insists that his clients agree never to alter any detail of their homes—not a door handle, a bathroom tile or a color scheme. He even installs secret video cameras to verify that they are keeping his masterpieces inviolate. His voyeuristic Assistant pores over the video footage for infractions and dreams up fitting punishments that turn the clients’ beautiful houses into hellholes. For example, the owner of an all-steel desert home modeled on a lunar landing module finds that its every surface zaps him with electric shocks, and a corporate CEO finds rats swarming out of his toilet every night. In the subtlest purgatory, The Architect arranges for a rich art collector to take in a fashionable young painter whose ulterior motives undermine the collector’s marriage and manhood. As the homeowners’ lives spin bizarrely out of control, The Architect increasingly finds himself a prisoner of the chameleonic Assistant, who’s trying to usurp The Architect’s identity. Spencer, a screenwriter and television executive, shapes his scenario into a boisterous sendup of the crassness of connoisseurship. His well-heeled characters spout pretentious art-world cant—“the ultimate priority is a confronting work”—while treating actual art like luxury brand-name furnishings. (The Architect calls one giant abstract painting “[i]ncredibly livable” to sell it to a client.) The author satirizes this ripe milieu with raucous humor and droll, insinuating prose. At times, his caricature is a bit too broad and gonzo, with gratuitous sexual transgressions that verge on the pornographic. More often than not, however, his well-aimed potshots hit their targets.

A rudely entertaining satire.