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FICTION
The Work
Bri Lee
Allen & Unwin, $32.99
It is easy to mock Bri Lee’s debut novel, The Work. There’s a great deal of sex, for starters, and the line between the erotic and the ridiculous is thin. I’ve spent a week trying to shake Lee’s image of a pair of middle-aged breasts dangling “like panna cottas”.
And then there is the issue-heavy plotting. Lee has spent her non-fiction career exploring our craggiest socio-cultural fault lines: who we believe (Eggshell Skull, 2018); the bodies we covet (Beauty, 2019); the brains we value (Who Gets to be Smart?, 2021). The Work feels like a culmination – or perhaps a collision – of everything she has learned so far about class, power and gendered cruelty. A novel of dutiful tutorials. It could be called The Homework.
Bri Lee’s book is an art-world novel, but its focus is on gatekeepers rather than art-makers.Credit: Saskia Wilson
Layer the usual first-novel problems over the top – baggy, clunky – add a shambolic final act, and you’ve got everything you need for a smug critical decimation. But it’s a gutsy move to change genres mid-career, especially with a book that’s so lavishly smutty. And there’s a smart novel lurking inside The Work – a tale of virtuous intentions turned sour; the toxic petulance of the benevolent.
The Work is an art-world novel, but its focus is on gatekeepers rather than art-makers – that incestuous network of curators, auction houses, publicists, critics and celebrity buyers. What interests Lee is the economic machinery of “taste”: what we sell, how we sell it, and what we think we’re buying.
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In Manhattan, thirty-something super-striver Lally, owns her own gallery. In order to showcase the diverse and emerging artists who excite her, Lally knows she also needs to program some crowd-pleasing, dick-swinging ego-monsters. But the artist Lally has scheduled for her biggest show of the year, Chuck Farr, has been accused of coercion by a number of his previous models.
There is no question Farr will sell out (“People had continued to buy Farr’s work after the allegations were aired, maybe even more greedily”). Is keeping him on the gallery walls unethical, or just savvy pragmatism? “Sure, everyone wanted the rich dickheads to lose,” Lally explains, “but you needed power for that.”
Meanwhile, in inner-city Sydney, Pat is eking out a living as a junior appraiser at a venerable auction house (“Osborne”). The pay is rubbish, but the prestige is intoxicating: the lure of old money. For a scholarship kid from regional Queensland – the son of bankrupted farmers – a permanent role at Osborne seems like the ticket to middle-class respectability: mortgage and a dog. “Rarely was the Osborne world view upset by anything at all. If he could secure his place there then he’d never have to be upset by anything either.”