Bonfire of the vulgarities

Law of tooth and claw reigns in Steve Martin’s sketch of the wheeler-dealer world of high art

November 28, 2010|Alec Solomita, Globe Correspondent

Most of us who pick up Steve Martin’s energetic, beautifully illustrated novel about the New York art world of the past two decades will find ourselves in terra incognita. The flora is familiar — the Van Goghs, Picassos, and Warhols that adorn our lives in one way or another — but the fauna! The exotic animals populating this landscape are a revelation, from the cheetahs who sprint across the veldt in pursuit of the loveliest gazelle to the birds of prey swooping in the darkening sky to the hyenas who slither in to grab their piece of the prize, and ultimately, to the packrats whose getting and spending has no end. It’s dangerous territory. We’re lucky to have a guide as savvy and intrepid as Martin.

The novelist-explorer delegates most of his fieldwork to the young, passive Daniel Franks, a fledgling Manhattan art writer and the narrator of “An Object of Beauty.’’ Franks and an old pal (and one-night stand), Lacey Yeager, gravitate to the New York art scene at about the same time. The tale that Franks — Nick Carraway-like — delivers is that of Lacey’s preternaturally amoral and muscular claw to the top of the wheeler-dealer world of trade in objets d’art. From “cataloging . . . nineteenth-century pictures in a dim basement’’ at Sotheby’s, the devious Lacey rises to the upper floors of the auction house and then to the upper reaches of the art world.

Carraway is indeed Franks’s literary ancestor. On the book’s jacket, Joyce Carol Oates compares “An Object of Beauty’’ to Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence.’’ Though Martin does attempt, with varying degrees of success, something like Wharton’s meticulous taxonomy of New York society in the 1870s, the story mirrors more closely the not-so-subtle striving of Jay Gatsby and Tom and Daisy Buchanan in “The Great Gatsby.’’

Not only the narrator, but also the “heroine’’ of “An Object of Beauty’’ recalls F. Scott Fitzgerald’s triumph. Like Gatsby, Lacey Yeager comes from a modest background, filled with immodest ambition. And like Daisy Buchanan, Lacey is catnip to men — “Even at the age of twenty . . . [when Lacey] left a room, there was a moment of deflation while we all returned to normal life.’’