I couldn’t be a woman,” Steve Martin once joked, “because I’d play with my breasts all day.” Now he has written a novel about a young woman, but nearly the only thing he can imagine about her is wanting to play with her breasts. The Object of Beauty is a nasty exercise in narcissism, particularly in the narcissism of the famous.



The novel narrates the tale of Lacey Yeager, a recent college graduate who comes to New York, gets a junior position at Sotheby’s, and quickly works her way up in the art world, eventually opening a gallery of her own in Chelsea. Martin describes very little about this character, other than that she has blonde hair, dresses well, and is really, really sexy. He seems to think that a novel about the art world should suffice with appearances. Every man who sees Lacey wants her, and she is always on the hunt for another conquest. She is the main “object of beauty” of the title. Yet Martin never makes her seem genuinely interesting or beautiful or lovely or intelligent; he just tears her out of the Style pages and tells you that she is desirable.

The book is narrated by a friend of Lacey’s from college, Daniel, who works as an art journalist. Daniel made the mistake of sleeping with her once at school, and he has never recovered: he simply cannot move on and find real post-Lacey love. He is writing the book as an attempt to free himself from her spell. Perhaps Martin wants the reader to think of Nick Carraway writing about Gatsby, or Sal Paradise musing about Dean Moriarty; but Daniel comes across as merely pathetic and emasculated, rather like the non-Steve Martin character in Shopgirl.

A mix of artists, collectors, dealers, and writers wander in and out of the plot, which is contrived to include all parts of the New York art scene, from private Upper East Side galleries to downtown alternative spaces, and the story includes a few standard art world misdeeds: stolen paintings, fakes, self-dealing. Martin interposes fictional characters with real people—Larry Gagosian, William Acquavella, John Updike, John Richardson, Peter Schjeldahl, and other well-known figures make cameo appearances. Many of the settings of the book are stenographically rendered as well—the restaurants, the bars, and the galleries where the glitterati of the art world actually hang out.

The Object of Beauty masquerades as a social satire—a sort of Bonfire of the Vanities, updated to cover the recent bubble in contemporary art—but really the book is a just a drab soap opera about the doings of one superficially hot but deeply unappealing young woman. Martin is too lazy or too diffident to try to describe this universe freshly or in any detail. Instead he lazily relies on knowingness. He drops names of famous people and famous restaurants without bothering in the slightest to tell you anything precise or new or imaginative about them. They are merely brands; shorthands for chic. If you already know what Sant'Ambroeus looks like, or who Bill Acquavella and Larry Gagosian are, you do not need to read the book. If you do not know who they are, or why they might have a claim on your time and attention, Martin will not tell you anything that will enable you to picture them. He does not even tell you why you should find them humanly interesting. All he makes you feel is that your ignorance should arouse your envy—that you, poor thing, are less fortunate than he and the fancy people in his book. The reader of this novel is like a tourist banished to the outside of the velvet rope.

What makes the book odder still is that when Martin does bother to take you inside this world by means of the fictional characters that he invents, he gets the scene nearly always wrong. Martin seemingly prides himself on being a collector, that is, on being himself a part of the scene that is his subject; but his insider’s powers of observation have sorrily failed him here. The way people dress, how they talk, what they do: he misses almost all of it. He has put all this together out of banalities and cliches, as if he did his research by skimming back issues of Vanity Fair and watching re-runs of Sex and the City.