BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Improbability of Love’

OPINION:

THE IMPROBABILITY OF LOVE

By Hannah Rothschild

Alfred A. Knopf, $27.95, 416 pages

The things people say.

The dust jacket of “The Improbability of Love” claims that it is “a satire worthy of Evelyn Waugh.” That’s neither true nor helpful.

For sure, author Hannah Rothschild has an occasional mocking line, but she’s nothing like as savage as Waugh. Like him too, she has characters who prance around the stylish and bohemian corners of London. But she also has characters, including her middle-class heroine, who would have been way beyond Waugh’s ken. Indeed, this novel — her first — needs no bolstering by comparisons to other authors. Energetic, clever, sometimes funny, sometimes sad and serious, it is an enormously readable mix of genres, with a romance, at least one mystery, even some thriller elements — all set in the more vertiginous reaches of the art world, where reputations and livelihoods depend on how many millions an auction house can entice from the punters.

Hannah Rothschild was the first woman to chair Britain’s National Gallery and is a trustee of London’s Tate Gallery, so her evocation of the art world rests on experience. She shows its color and excitements, and also its darker corners, where manipulating the market is all in a day’s work and connoisseurs and tricksters can be hard to tell apart — not least because some people are both.

Annie McDee, the central character, gets mixed up in all this when she picks up an appealingly pretty painting in a junk shop. Still grieving the end of a long relationship, she has a new boyfriend she wants to please with a birthday dinner and a gift of this little painting. He doesn’t show up, so now Annie, more distraught than ever, is sure that love will never again come her way.

She’s almost forgets the painting she now owns, but others show considerable interest. One is her alcoholic mother, who sees something similar in an art gallery and persuades Annie to show it to experts. Predictably perhaps, they disagree and the matter would end there, but Memling Winkleman, a wealthy and powerful dealer, displays extraordinary interest, and therefore so does his severe daughter Rebecca.

Ordinarily, the paths of the Winklemans and Annie would never cross, but one of the experts who passes judgment on her painting hires her to make a special dinner. Annie creates spectacular food based on historical recipes and serves it in a period setting. Soon she is hired as the Winklemans’ cook, and after that the troubles of her love life and her mother are compounded by her troubles with the painting. Rebecca realizes that Annie bought it from the junk shop, and obedient, as always, to her father’s wishes, she tries to get it back at all costs. Those costs are to prove enormous, taking Rebecca into her father’s hidden origins and uncovering the source of masterpieces he is so skilled at unearthing and selling.

Hannah Rothschild unfolds the overlapping stories of her novel so that it grows to cover a larger and larger area and more and more people. Among these, are a modern Beau Brummel with roots in the working class of the north of England, an impoverished earl who works as an auctioneer, and a Russian billionaire recently exiled from his country. He is encouraged into the market for contemporary art, where he competes with the ambitious wife of a sheikh determined to fill her newly built museum in the desert with the best of European art. (If this seems beyond belief, it’s worth noting that only a week after “The Improbability of Love” was published a Chinese tycoon — formerly a taxi driver — paid $190 million for a Modigliani to be displayed in his museum in Shanghai.)

Among this large cast of characters Annie’s painting has a speaking part. Letting the reader know that it’s aggrieved to be in Annie’s flat, it recalls its painter — Watteau — and its former aristocratic owners, and longs only to back with the masterpieces that are its peers. While some readers may find this narratorial painting less than felicitous, they will enjoy the varied array of other characters, who range from the farcical through the entertaining to the seriously scary. Then, of course, there’s Annie to root for.

With such a throng of characters Hannah Rothschild can raise a number of serious questions. Can any painting be worth all the millions now routinely paid in auction houses? Why do paintings have such power to capture our attention? What are the effects of paintings on the lives of their owners or the people who love them? She offers some answers. More importantly, she offers an interesting, amusing and highly readable novel.

• Claire Hopley is a writer and editor in Amherst, Mass.