Synopses & Reviews
Edward Darby has everything a man could hope for: meaningful work, a loving wife, and a beloved daughter. With a rising career as a partner at an esteemed gallery, he strives not to let ambition, money, power, and his dark past corrode the sanctuary of his domestic and private life. Influenced by his father, a brilliant Romantics scholar, Edward has always been more of a purist than an opportunist. But when a celebrated artist controlled by her insecurities betrays him, and another very different artist awakens his heart and stirs up secrets from his past, Edward will find himself unmoored from his marriage, his work, and the memory of his beloved father. And when the finalist of an important prize are announced, and the desperate artists maneuver to seek its validation, Edward soon learns that betrayal comes in many forms, and that he may be hurtling toward an act that challenges his own notions about what comprises a life worth living. A compelling odyssey of a man unhinged by his ideals,
The Prize is also an unflinching portrait of a marriage struggling against the corroding tide of time and the proximity to the treacherous fault line between art and money.
Review
Praise for
The Prize:
"And for someone whose life is built around finding the significance in the smallest of momentsmoments which Bialosky captures with such powerful insightthere is much at stake for him to lose. In the end, after betrayals and loss and sadness, Bialosky asks her hero to consider what he holds most dear. Like Edward feels upon discovering a transcendent piece of art, this book finds that little opening at the edge of your soul and seeps in."Kirkus Starred Review
"[A] luminous behind-the-scenes view of the art world.... One expects a poets prose to soar in fiction, and the author does not disappoint, crafting her own work of art with her evocative, fresh descriptions and her careful observations of how artists transform inspiration into their work."Publishers Weekly
"Bialosky...articulates with grace the crass and the sublime as she explores questions of character, art, obsession, ambition, lies, loneliness, and love. This fluently sophisticated and exquisitely pleasurable novel is radiant with precise and sensuous descriptions and intricately laced with discerning and affecting insights into the passion and business of art and the meaning and struggles of marriage."Booklist Starred Review
"The Prize is a subtle, incisive, and erotically charged exploration of the dark crossroad where art, money, and obsession converge. Jill Bialosky has written a true and dangerous novel." John Banville, author of The Sea
Jill Bialosky brings a poets ear for language to this moving, knowing meditation on marriage and art and the emotional costs of a life spent in pursuit of even the worthiest ideals.” Jonathan Dee, author of The Privileges, Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
In The Prize, Jill Bialosky has written an erotically charged story about the contemporary art world suggestive of a Roman a clef, but far more sponsored by a sublime and sympathetic narrative imagination and boldness. The character of Agnes a brilliant artist is a deliciously maddening figure who makes Machiavellian strategies of ambition seem like child's play. Impressively, many of Bialosky's people can't seem to stop apprenticing themselves to their worst instincts (to quote Chekhov) and how they reconfigure their lives to fit their delusions of grandeur makes for hypnotic betrayals. The Prize is vividly modern, and in the tensions offered between art and life, timeless. Yet finally, Bialosky's novel is a kind of old-fashioned love story, with an ending whose bittersweetness is powerfully earned.” Howard Norman, author of The Bird Artist
Jill Bialosky has written a haunting novel about the gulf between art and the art world the place where deals are made and souls are lost but more, about the cost of our choices, our failures, and our silences. Wintry, subtle, unnerving and mysterious in its impact, this book drew me in deeply and really got to me.” Joan Wickersham, author of The News from Spain and The Suicide Index, a Finalist for the National Book Award
A compulsively readable novel about art: both that on the canvas, and that of finding one's home in another.”Elizabeth Berg, author of Open House
"Renowned poet Jill Bialosky has once again turned her penetrating eye to fiction and lucky for us, because here she delves deeply into nothing less then the complexities of art and desire, and their often dangerous interaction with commerce. At its heart, her wonderful new work, The Prize, is tense, romantic, and timely; a novel about passion and betrayal." Helen Schulman, author of This Beautiful Life
About the Author
Jill Bialosky is the author of four poetry collections,
The Players,
The End of Desire,
Subterranean, a finalist for the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and Intruder, a finalist for the 2009 Patterson Poetry Prize. She co-edited
Wanting a Child and has written two novels,
House Under Snow and
The Life Room. Her most recent memoir,
History of a Suicide: My Sisters Unfinished Life was a
New York Times bestseller, named one of the ten best works of nonfiction by
Entertainment Weekly and a finalist for Books for A Better Life Award and an Ohioana Award. Her poems and essays have been published in many magazines including
The New Yorker,
The Nation,
Redbook,
O Magazine,
Real Simple,
Kenyon Review,
Antioch Review,
The New Republic,
Paris Review,
Poetry, and
American Poetry Review. She lives in New York City. Learn more at jillbialosky.com.