FRIENDS OF THE MUSEUM, by Heather McGowan
Brevity, in fiction, has its merits; but sometimes a narrative actually needs to be a door-stopper to achieve what it sets out to do.
Heather McGowan’s third novel, “Friends of the Museum,” clocks in at a dense 480 pages, and opens with a cast list to help readers keep track of its 50-character ensemble. The conceit is clever: Set over one day in a New York museum during the 2010s, McGowan’s plot details the inner turmoil and professional calamities of the institution’s staff as they prepare for the evening’s Met-inspired costume gala.
The author seamlessly translates the perennial ironies of the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute fund-raiser into fiction. The theme of McGowan’s event is “One Hundred and Fifty Years of the Bohemian: Outsiders Looking In,” and in the words of one visitor to the exhibit, it’s “crazy to celebrate anarchy at a party where the tickets go for two grand.”
We open at 5:30 a.m., with the director, Diane, and her general counsel, Henry, discussing the murky provenance of a Shiva statue and its potential legal consequences for the museum. Diane is preoccupied with the breakdown of her marriage and the threat of losing her job after bungling the museum’s finances; Henry is preoccupied with his own mortality after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis. They soon pivot to a case of food poisoning that has incapacitated 11 employees at a board member’s retirement party.
By 8:14 a.m. we have also met: Clive, the head curator of European paintings, whose mind frequently wanders to his strained relationships with his ailing father and Berlin-bound best friend; Benjamin, whose first day on the job as a film curator is marred by the encroaching urgency of paying $8,000 of debt; the conservator Iona, whose concern over the legitimacy of a prominent donor’s marble statue is overlaid by a family that drives her to drink tequila for breakfast; Katherine, a costume curator who juggles gala planning with deciding whether to abort an unplanned pregnancy; and Shay, the chief security officer, whose early-onset dementia leaves her determined to find a suitable mentor for her nephew while she endures microaggressions doled out by her predominantly white colleagues.
If that sounds like an onslaught, it is. McGowan exploits the potential of her workplace setting with ruthless precision, the museum’s staff offering endless possibilities for sociopolitical commentary, interpersonal dalliances, economic hypocrisies and questions of cultural legacy.
The problem is, there’s no time for the reader to luxuriate in them. The novel’s pace matches that of its characters’ hellish workday — which is fun in theory and fatiguing in practice. Across the short, time-stamped sections, plot points pile up quickly, beat after perpetual beat.
It’s all easy enough to follow, though one gets the sense McGowan has refined everything perhaps a little too neatly. A potential donor to the museum describes it as an “antiseptic mausoleum that’s hostile to people of color.” There’s very little in the book to contradict this. But few of us need a 480-page novel to show us that the arts have failed to bring society together; one look at X distributes proof of that concept forcibly, and for free.
McGowan’s prose is solid, her one-liners effortless, and political observations sound, if run of the mill. All fine. But wasted potential is always a sad thing. With characters so thorny and a setup so fun, the novel’s politics should be anything but straightforward. Another 480 pages might have allowed for the scope of a more radical or imaginative look at how our cultural institutions and their guardians ought to work, rather than satirizing the very obvious ways in which they fail. It’s time to be brave about publishing longer novels.
FRIENDS OF THE MUSEUM | By Heather McGowan | Washington Square Press | 483 pp. | $29.99
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