#1: An Object of Beauty, Steve Martin

I feel conflicted about An Object of Beauty. I absolutely adore Steve Martin (and should I ever win an Oscar, I fantasize that he will be the one to hand it over) and found this novel to be a quick read on a flight home from Europe. But I didn't actually like it - I kept waiting for the action to start but it never really did...and then it ended with a dull deus en machina event. As usual, I will do a little spoiling, but only a very little bit.

An Object of Beauty tells the sordid tale of a young woman named Lacey Yeager who is determined to take Manhattan by storm, by any means possible. So it's all sex and schemes and it seems to work even though she's kinda despicable. The telling of all this comes by an old friend, narrator Daniel Franks, who documents her high-powered career in the art world in order to try to figure out her allure and her tricks. As he says in the first line, "I am tired, so very tired of thinking about Lacey Yeager, yet I worry that unless I write her story down, I will be unable to ever write about anything else." Writing this now, I sort of see a parallel with Nick Carraway and The Great Gastsby - it's another book where a passive narrator is trying to figure out why selfish people are doing bad things and why, for a time, he participates. And yet, An Object of Beauty is no Great Gatsby.

I think the main reason (and the biggest problem with the book) was that the pivotal moment - when Lacey acquires a large sum of money through devious means - comes very quietly. So quietly, in fact, that only in retrospect did I see that it was the do-or-die moment for Lacey, the moment that the entire novel hinged on. It was also the turning point for the narrator. I guess the incident was to remain as a question stuck in my mind, but it was so undramatic that I forgot about it. Which is the problem with having an emotionally distant narrator - he didn't seem to care that much about it, so why would I?

The most interesting thing about An Object of Beauty was the 22 color art prints scattered throughout the book. I was shocked when the first one appeared on page 14 (though perhaps I should have just read the book jacket more carefully). Oh, and I learned that Steve Martin and I have wildly different versions of what constitutes "sex." His descriptions and the use of the word sex didn't seem to match up in the conventional definition - and I think that might actually, randomly be my biggest takeaway. So take from that what you will.