August 1, 2019
A 25-year veteran of the Metropolitan Museum of Art makes her fiction debut with a literary homage to the venerable New York City institution. What really goes on behind the scenes and after hours at a major museum? In this series of loosely linked surreal vignettes, Coulson takes us on a tour of the hidden world that tourists never see: the conservation galleries, the staff cafeteria, the dusty storerooms, and dark tunnels--"the grim bowels below the basement where storage cages made with woven-metal fencing held retired art and cartons of old paperwork." We also meet the Met's eccentric staff and its wealthy patrons. In "Musing," snooty director Michel Larousse, upon learning that Karl Lagerfeld is bringing a muse to a meeting at the Met, scours his museum's collections for his own personal muse. In "The Talent," neurotic curator Nick Morton obsesses about losing prime gallery space to a rival ("My pictures cannot hang on nine-foot walls"). And in "Mezz Girls," lonely, cranky Mrs. Leonard Havering dines at a benefit auction with the troublesome ghost of a previous Met benefactor. And then there's the art: In "Chair as Hero," an 18th-century fauteuil à la reine in the Wrightsman Galleries recalls comforting the distraught young daughter of the Duchess of Parma, and in "Adam," a Renaissance statue craves movement, with disastrous results. Magical realism requires finesse, and while some of Coulson's fables offer a bit of fun whimsy (a time-traveling passageway in "Meats & Cheeses" leads to the Met's 1920 Egyptian expedition), clunky prose too often spoils the mood. ("Rather paltry, he smirked"; " 'No sweetie, ' chomped a showgirl version of Calliope from the European Paintings collection"). Coulson obviously loves her former employer, but her vignettes never add up to more than the sum of their parts. Still, this will sell in the Met's store as an alternative guidebook to its rich treasures. Don't expect any Night at the Museum hijinks here.
COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
August 26, 2019
Coulson’s sly, whimsical debut takes the form of a collection of connected stories set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
. Grounded in the author’s decades of experience working at the Met, the surreal stories scamper among multiple points of view, both human and other. Ghosts appear, and pieces of furniture and paintings express their opinions. In “Musing,” the museum’s ambitious director seeks a Muse to take to a meeting, auditioning candidates from the Greek and Roman galleries as well as more recently painted Muses, all of whom banter among themselves about him and the auditioning process. In “Big-Boned,” an “underdrawing,” concealed for centuries by the paint of a finished work, slips out to work in the staff cafeteria. “Adam” and “Night Moves” both regard the tumble and fall of a statue, from the views of the statue itself, yearning to wiggle, and the guard who leaves his post by the statue to do the push-ups that he hopes will make him look more manly. The Met that emerges from these stories is both grandiose and cheerfully mundane, a place so packed with wonders that no one person can know them all. Those who think they know the place will be beguiled by the look behind the scenes; those unfamiliar with it will be prompted to make its acquaintance.
Starred review from November 1, 2019
Coulson's 25 years on staff at the Metropolitan Museum of Art inspired this vivid, comedic, tender, and episodic debut about the unexpected forms life and consciousness take in that vast trove. The overture, We, expresses the staff's commitment to the museum's collections and the reciprocal feelings of the art and objects for the people who tend to them. This establishes the novel's curious symbiosis and gives rise to some surprising narrators. An amorous museum guard, an anxious curator, and a lamper afraid of the dark all share their experiences, but so does a lavishly decorated chair constructed in 1749 for the Duchess of Parma, a 506-year-old marble statue of Adam intent on an heroic act, and a sketched figure hidden beneath the surface of a Tintoretto painting who emerges to flirt with and cajole discouraged staff. The ghost of a past benefactor wreaks havoc; one young assistant sent on a mission deep in the museum's tunnels walks through a portal into an alternative time and place, and another finds a secret masterpiece. Coulson is emotionally keen, acerbically witty, fleetly imaginative, and lyrically resonant, her love for the Met, for humanness, and for beauty radiant on each surprising page.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)
August 1, 2019
A 25-year veteran of the Metropolitan Museum of Art makes her fiction debut with a literary homage to the venerable New York City institution. What really goes on behind the scenes and after hours at a major museum? In this series of loosely linked surreal vignettes, Coulson takes us on a tour of the hidden world that tourists never see: the conservation galleries, the staff cafeteria, the dusty storerooms, and dark tunnels--"the grim bowels below the basement where storage cages made with woven-metal fencing held retired art and cartons of old paperwork." We also meet the Met's eccentric staff and its wealthy patrons. In "Musing," snooty director Michel Larousse, upon learning that Karl Lagerfeld is bringing a muse to a meeting at the Met, scours his museum's collections for his own personal muse. In "The Talent," neurotic curator Nick Morton obsesses about losing prime gallery space to a rival ("My pictures cannot hang on nine-foot walls"). And in "Mezz Girls," lonely, cranky Mrs. Leonard Havering dines at a benefit auction with the troublesome ghost of a previous Met benefactor. And then there's the art: In "Chair as Hero," an 18th-century fauteuil � la reine in the Wrightsman Galleries recalls comforting the distraught young daughter of the Duchess of Parma, and in "Adam," a Renaissance statue craves movement, with disastrous results. Magical realism requires finesse, and while some of Coulson's fables offer a bit of fun whimsy (a time-traveling passageway in "Meats & Cheeses" leads to the Met's 1920 Egyptian expedition), clunky prose too often spoils the mood. ("Rather paltry, he smirked"; " 'No sweetie, ' chomped a showgirl version of Calliope from the European Paintings collection"). Coulson obviously loves her former employer, but her vignettes never add up to more than the sum of their parts. Still, this will sell in the Met's store as an alternative guidebook to its rich treasures. Don't expect any Night at the Museum hijinks here.
COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.