A Most Welcome Change

A Most Welcome Change

Here’s the book that Kirkus Reviews calls "a deliciously eclectic drama that sharply satirizes pretention and venality in the professional art world", and Amazon reviewers are equating with Donna Tartt’s Goldfinch and Michael Frayn’s Headlong.A Most Welcome Change can be thought of primarily as a suspense novel set in the middle of a cockeyed art world. It is a world that has gone off its societal axis, where market value all too often takes precedence over artistic merit, where “the nature of [abstract art] allows exceptional tolerance for incompetence and deception”*, and where the passionate art collector has been replaced by the billionaire power broker. These are the threads that have been tightly woven into an intimate narrative having to do with a controversial painting, a loving couple, a strained father/son relationship, and an irreconcilable conflict between two well-known artists. We learn much about the complicated art authentication process from a starchy character who talks too much. And from the mouths of our betters is a generous helping of grandiloquent art-speak. A tutorial on money laundering and seeking status features a pack of Machiavellian characters, among which is a very edgy hedge fund manager, a corrupt Russian oligarch and a third world potentate. There is a dramatic auction, a mountain top revolution, a little Panama law firm and let us not forget something called murder. But finding out whether the questionable painting at our story’s epicenter is the real thing, or just a blatant forgery, will require reading A Most Welcome Change from its tranquil beginning to its galvanizing end. *Abstracted from the critic John Canaday