Member Review

The novel has intelligent points to make about art in a time when money and commerce seem to be the forces that determine the worth of things. The four main characters are richly and sensitively drawn, though their opposing backgrounds are, conveniently, too diametrically perfect: the wealthy daughter of art collectors versus her small-town roommate getting by on scholarships and odd jobs; the hotshot contrarian rabble-rouser who finds an instant audience for his stunt projects versus the older, somewhat resentful artist and professor whose relevance has faded. In the parochial environment of an elite art school, everyone is each other's muse--hence the aptly named Karina, as in Anna Karina, the wife and muse of Jean-Luc Godard. There are the natural dramas and love triangles of young people set against more serious challenges and the environs of the Occupy Wall Street protests, and Angress does a terrific job of ratcheting up these tensions in believable ways, though at times the conflicts feel juvenile. The younger characters, in particular, seem to live for an all-or-nothing existence--life is nothing without art--that any reasonable adult voice might try to temper, and when a reasonable adult emerges in the second half of the book to put one character's dream in perspective, it feels like the kind of sentiment the reader could have arrived at 100 pages earlier.