Written by Steve Martin, Narrated by Campbell Scott

-an audio book review-

Jo Anna Perrin

I have always been a Steve Martin fan, but like many, a Steve Martin Hollywood fan. I have to admit, I have a problem with the ease that celebrities seem to  have, deservedly or not, in  obtaining publishing contracts.  Consequently it has taken me a while to dip my ambivalent  toe into the Steve Martin as author category, regardless of how endearing I might find Steve Martin, the public icon. So it was with reservations that I picked up Martin’s An Object of Beauty as read by Campbell Scott.

And now, you might ask?  Well, in the  on-going battle of celebrity vs. deservedness, Mr. Martin is in a class by himself; a celeb who actually merits the authorship hype.

An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin is a pleasure of a book, punctuated by contradictions. It is a reflection on the highly specific and rarefied world of Art.  Except it is the revelation of Art as commodity and coin, not art for art’s sake, or art for spiritual appreciation. An insider’s road map to the buying and selling, as well as the marketing of Art, orchestrated by  auction houses, galleries, museums and clandestine places, a sensual world inhabited by the privileged few.

Enter our heroine, Lacey Yeager who uses Art as her entree into the uptown world of New York sophistication. Shrewd, sexy, uninhibited  and ambitious, she has an innate ability to peg the next biggest thing, and the inspiration to fund that drive even if it means flirting with immorality, illegality or leaving a trail of damaged  and spent men in her wake.

Mr. Martin’s prose is often stylistically sparse, polished to a finely honed point, but always underscored by sardonic humor, and narrator Campbell Scott captures each nuance flawlessly.

Scott’s performance is subtle but intriguing, fleshing out the often skeletal Lacey and her chronicler, the infatuated  Daniel Franks.  A freelance art writer and aspiring author, Daniel has an air of both resignation and awe in the retelling of Lacey’s story, and thus, the inevitability of his unfolding intertwined fate, and audio narrator Scott aptly captures this dual spirit of ennui dipped in naive wonder.

The novel often takes on the feeling of diary-like vignettes leading to a morality tale of social history, greed and excesses that parallel, and are fueled by, historical events. The peaks and valleys of life from the 90’s through the present are on display, including a rendering of 9/11 post traumatic miasma that is so on the mark from a New York point of view it ceases to read as fiction. And a cheerless look at the start of the credit crisis in 2007, an apocalyptic time in which art prices and art’s once transcendent high rollers, along with stocks, and real-estate cash cows, burst like airy bubbles.

An Object of Beauty  is a novel, a diary, a history lesson, and a compendium of insightful explanations of art and artists so rich as to be elucidating. Moreover, it remains a cautionary saga to direct us to where we’ve been, and possibly, a caveat to how we got there in the first place. It slyly manages to be both simple yet complex, and in the added ability of Mr. Scott, a truly satisfying listen.

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