Australian art historian Sophia’s life from the outside appears to be perfect. She has scored a prestigious two-year fellowship at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, chosen from 1000 applicants. Robert, her partner of five years, is applying for Ivy League teaching roles. They live in his family-owned Lower East Side apartment and dine in stylish restaurants.
From the inside, Sophia’s life feels less shiny. She is a fellow at an institution where she feels invisible and which demands “absolute allegiance while offering precarity and little acknowledgement”. She can’t envisage her future beyond MoMA. Being Australian, she will need a potential employer to sponsor a work visa. She is also nudging 30 and has acquired “a half-forgotten PhD and no meaningful publications or exhibitions to my name”. Once, she had felt “young and brilliant, brimming with potential … while at MoMA I felt constantly inadequate”. At the many weddings she attends with Robert, she’s inevitably asked about “life after MoMA, if I’d be getting married or going home”. The truth is, she feels ambivalent about marriage and remains unresolved about declaring her sexual orientation. Her fellowship is about to end, with no alternative yet arranged.
Sophia left Australia “after years trying to avoid the question of sexuality”. She had a relationship with the beautiful, confident Emily, a Californian studying in Australia and “darling of the queer scene”.
Her story of living with economic uncertainty, navigating the path of love, desire and selfhood, and seeking a role that will match her interests and education, reflects familiar millennial terrain. The “modern” of the title speaks to “modernity as a central concern guiding acquisitions, exhibition proposals” at MoMA and also to the different ways of being modern and the desire by Sophia and her colleagues to achieve that. But is she modern, she asks herself.
Before Robert departs for an extended hike on the Appalachian Trail, he proposes. Without much thought, she accepts. In his absence, rather than feeling positive about their future together and fully committing to it, she feels uncertain.
Sophia plays a double game that reeks of emotional dishonesty. She dutifully emails Robert while continuing to question the institution of marriage and her sexuality. After visiting high-end bridal shops, she concludes that marriage appears “to be a ritual sacrificing of women to patriarchy and capitalism”.
Feeling lonely, confused and untethered, Sophia develops a crush on Cara, an undergraduate fine art student in her early twenties. She seems curiously unconcerned that this infatuation could jeopardise her engagement.
She feels “guilty for passing, so often, as straight”. She wants it both ways – “to live a queer life while remaining with Robert”, who represents security and stability. And she struggles to come to terms with her forthcoming marriage when her professional future is still up for grabs.
Her thinking reflects an element of naivety and self-delusion. When her perspective on her previous relationship with Emily is upended, it raises questions about how reliable a chronicler Sophia is of her own life. Others incorrectly assume she’s straight, yet she fails to come clean with Robert.
This novel, Blair’s debut, is thoughtful, nuanced and beautifully crafted, though it does feel a touch too long, given that little of significance happens until the last third. Sophia is relentless in agonising about her sexuality. The will she/won’t she seesaw about her future with Robert began to pall. What did engage were the evocative descriptions of New York, its restaurants and exhibitions, and Sophia’s research into a deceased Abstract Expressionist painter.
Robert’s unexpected response to Sophia’s ambivalence finally jolts her into confronting her actions. The stakes have been higher than she realised. Her youth has disappeared, together with her relationship.
Aspects of Sophia’s life and academic achievements parallel that of the author. Anna Kate Blair is from New Zealand, and is now based in Melbourne. Like her character Sophia, she holds a PhD in History of Art and Architecture and has worked at MoMA.
The Modern will hold particular appeal to readers who have enjoyed novels by Dolly Alderton, Diana Reid and Sally Rooney, as well as to those with an interest in the queer millennial experience.
The Modern, by Anna Kate Blair (Scribner, $37.99)
