Lally, a 30-something New York gallery owner, has just exhibited an artist to great success, but he has died suddenly. She has bounced back well from this, despite the fact that she was having an affair with him. Maybe it’s because the MoMA gallery has leapt in to buy the exhibition, an extraordinary coup for a gallery owner in her third year.
Lally is a beautiful young woman who has certain rules in life that have kept her single. She has never seen a gallery owner with a happy marriage, so she’s not going there, and she thinks being a mother is a guaranteed way of becoming mediocre, so that’s not happening, either.
But then she meets Patrick, a young Australian in New York for the city’s Armory Show art fair. The chemistry is undeniable, and their affair is steamy. She is from the new art world and he loves the old world, though that doesn’t have to be a deal breaker. After the initial entanglement, a long-distance relationship ensues, if with some mixed messaging from Lally. She can see that she would be great for Pat’s career, but he wouldn’t be so good for hers. However, he makes her feel like she’s flying, and maybe she needs someone on her side as her friends partner up.
Bri Lee, an Australian journalist and activist writing her first novel, paints the pair warts and all. Pat seems a fairly shallow sort of guy, fighting an insecurity complex after being a country boy on a scholarship at a top school. He also feels he has fluked into his junior associate job at an antiquities auction house and could be sacked at any minute. And he has made some rookie mistakes, including accepting an intimate invitation from a wealthy female client with whom he had a connection.
Lally, meanwhile, believes that to support her emerging artists programmes, she has to make some commercial decisions, taking on big-name artists, even if they have erred along the way and continue to do so. You know this is going to end in tears, but she carries on obliviously.
The novel is thought provoking and occasionally confronting. It probes some of art’s big questions. If an artist does something awful, should gallerists keep selling their work if buyers are still interested? How bad does their behaviour have to be? Can an artist of the past be re-examined on their merits today? And is it possible to be a good person in life and art?
Lee addresses the novel’s key turning points with a clear, and visual, eye. You wriggle in your seat when Lally’s commercial artist misbehaves on a grand scale. Though their faults are evident, we see Lally and Pat at their lowest ebb and they deserve some luck. At its heart, The Work is a love story, and you can’t help hoping it’ll turn out okay once they’ve learnt a few life lessons.
