Customer Comments

If Shopgirl was emotionally remote, lacking a warm place to connect to, in An Object of Beauty Martin has found a way to tell the story that gives the human element the same warm intimacy the author evidently feels for art. The title is a pun, of course, and curiously enough in conflating the passion for art with the passion for another person neither is reduced, but both come to life. Readers will come away with a richer understanding of art and may be surprised to feel an unfamiliar sympathy for the marketplace, which turns out to be as essential a part of elevated aesthetic pleasure as the flawed persons who inhabit it.

Over the Labor Day weekend three people who could be great if only they had the chance to live up to their potential get the chance. Along the way we learn that their fundamental, pure goodness is balanced by those who are fundamentally, purely evil. The prose is pablum, presumably excused by the narrator being a 13-year old who thinks and speaks like an 8-year old. He has no sense of anyone else possessing consciousness or having a right to an equally compelling version. This is a dream for those who find reality lacking in anything compelling.

As was the case with The Reader, Schlink wants nothing less than to globally change the way we think about the world around us. I usually assume that the main thrust of what I'm told is true, though the petty details may not be. But what if the details are not petty? What if despite the witness's story, your father didn't die when you were a child? What if he lived a brilliant life and never came back to check on you, never showed any curiosity about you? Would than change everything, or nothing, or some things? Would it change our instinct, our passion, to trust the world beneath our feet?