The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin

Steve Martin’s An Object of Beauty reads at first like a fable about taste: a slim, gleaming novel in which the currency is looks, and the marketplace is Manhattan. Scratch the surface, though, and his book reveals itself as a careful, often savage study of perception and performance — of how beauty is produced, packaged, and sold. It is, in its way, a comic tragedy about commodification: smart, elegiac, and, finally, unnerving.

A précis (without spoilers)

The narrative follows Lacey Yeager, a woman who arrives in New York in the 1980s with charm, ambition, and an uncanny instinct for what will be judged beautiful. Over the course of the novel we watch her move through auction houses, galleries, celebrities’ apartments, and elite museums. Lacey’s trajectory — from brilliant dealer and tastemaker to a figure enmeshed in the very systems she manipulates — serves as a vehicle to dramatize the art world’s social choreography: the transactions, the gossip, the staging, and the moral obfuscations that let a market call itself culture.

On voice and structure

Martin, known to many as a comedian and performer, deploys a voice here that melds cool lucidity with a controlled comic edge. The prose is compact, often crystalline; sentences land with the exactness of well-cut stones. There are wry, observational flourishes — little ironies that puncture glamour — but he never allows humour to dissolve into caricature. Structure-wise, the novel is episodic: a sequence of set-pieces in which the art world is observed almost ethnographically. This episodic mode is an asset rather than a limitation: it mirrors the gallery-goer’s experience — a succession of encounters where the next object always promises (and sometimes fails to deliver) revelation.

Lacey Yeager: character as enactment

Lacey is the book’s magnetic center and its moral puzzle. The book paints her with both admiration and cool forensic interest. She is charismatic, self-fashioned, and alarmingly adept at making desire look like value. Yet Lacey is not merely villain or ingénue; she is a performer who understands the stagecraft of taste. Her narcissism and appetite are both personal and structural: they reflect individual choices and the incentives of a market that rewards the appearance of connoisseurship. Martin resists easy sympathy, but he does grant complexity — moments when Lacey’s longing for recognition looks eerily like aesthetic devotion.

This ambivalence — treating Lacey as both artist and artifact — is one of the novel’s central achievements. Rather than reducing her to an allegorical figure, Martin lets her inhabit contradictions: the sophisticated peddler of beauty who can still be moved, occasionally, by what she sells.

Themes: beauty, value, and the theatre of taste

At stake in the novel are the perennial questions of aesthetics: When does an object become beautiful? Who has the authority to decide? Martin’s argument is not a single thesis so much as a dramatized inquiry: beauty in the modern market is simultaneously an effect and a commodity. The work examines the rituals that transform objects into “must-haves” — provenance, celebrity endorsement, scarcity, narrative — and how those rituals mask the arbitrariness at the heart of valuation.

Closely related is the theme of performance. Dealers, collectors, critics, and artists in Martin’s New York are actors playing roles — and Lacey’s genius is her ability to perform the role that validates others’ desires. The novel thus becomes a meditation on authenticity: not only the authenticity of objects, but the authenticity of people who situate themselves as arbiters of taste.

Style: sensory precision and the ethics of description

One of the writer’s gifts here is description. He writes about objects with an almost tactile attention to surface: the sheen of a modernist painting, the way light folds on carved ivory, the precise wrongness of a fake. These passages are not merely decorative; they are ethical probes — invitations to look slowly and to ask why the slow look is so easily purchased. The book’s sensory language often contrasts with the chilly accounting of auctions and sales, which heightens the moral questions beneath the shimmer.

Limits and provocations

If the novel has a weakness, it is an occasional tendency toward too-tidy moral resolution. Because Martin is clearly fascinated by the machine of the art market, some secondary characters remain sketches rather than fully realized human beings — they perform roles (dealer, collector, journalist) in order to illuminate the system. Yet one could argue that this stylization is deliberate: the book shows us a world where identities are instruments, and so characters serve that depiction.

How it sits in Martin’s oeuvre

Readers familiar with Martin’s earlier fiction and essays will recognize the same precision and a similar quiet melancholy — the comedian’s eye for the absurd married to a novelist’s patience. An Object of Beauty extends his interest in performance and shows that his comic sensibility can shade into serious cultural critique without losing its observational bite.

An Object of Beauty is a quietly ambitious novel: witty where it must be witty, lyrical when description demands it, and unrelenting in its scrutiny of the marketplace that turns sensation into currency. It asks readers to look — not merely to admire — and to consider what is paid for in the act of looking. For anyone interested in the intersections of art, commerce, and identity, this book offers both pleasure and provocation; it is, in the best sense, itself an object worth thinking about.