The Art Fair
A Novel
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A poignant and painfully funny novel about the New York art world by the acclaimed author of Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself
For two first-class years, Joan Freeley had it all: the perfect family, the best art dealer in Manhattan, and the admiration of famous friends. Her adoring husband and two handsome sons attended her first gallery show in matching khakis and blue blazers. “An Interesting Talent Makes Its Debut,” declared the New York Times. Then, as if her success were nothing more than a booking error, Joan’s life got downgraded. A brutal divorce led to paintings too bitter to sell and a career stuck firmly in coach.
Unable to see her suffer alone any longer, Joan’s teenage son Richard leaves his father and older brother in Los Angeles and moves in to her one-bedroom apartment in SoHo. At the gallery openings where she used to be a star, Richard discovers just how much his mother’s light has dimmed. She is an artist who is not showing—she might as well be invisible. To acknowledge her is to acknowledge the thin line between success and failure in a world as superficial as it is intoxicating.
Richard immediately devotes himself to returning his mother to her former glory. Everything about him—the clothes he wears, the jokes he makes, the college he attends—is calculated to boost Joan’s reputation. But as the years go by and the galleries keep sending back her slides, Richard has to ask: Who wants Joan Freeley’s resurrection more—him or her? And when will his own life start?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The author of a short-story collection (Three Thousand Dollars) and a sociology of Generation X (Late Bloomers), Lipsky here weighs in with a tender but slight first novel narrated by a Manhattan teenager suffering from an overweening attachment to his mother. In a voice that is by turns keenly perceptive and mawkishly earnest, Richard Freely recalls his preadolescence in New York, when his mother, Joan, who has since struggled as an abstract painter, was for a brief spell the darling of the snooty 1970s art scene. After a bitter divorce, which sent Richard and his brother to L.A. to live with their father, her social and professional status faded. Blaming himself, Richard resolves to move into her one-bedroom apartment in SoHo and help jump-start her career, playing both her son and confidante and accompanying her to openings, where she is often ostracized. He "finally breaks up with mother" at an artists' retreat in upstate New York, where Joan succeeds at winning back her old dealer, while Richard's own reconciliation with an estranged girlfriend allows him to acknowledge his disabling maternal attachment. The art-world background is drawn in broad, crayon-like strokes: it's a circus of fine cheese and wine, catty, social-climbing artists and arrogant critics and dealers who talk less of aesthetics than of fashion and status. But readers may appreciate Lipsky's understated style, both wide-eyed and satirical, with amusing ironic asides ("it seemed I lived on Brie, and even now, when I eat that cool, slimy food, something is triggered, and I look around for fear that I'm being judged ungenerously.").
