Jill Bialosky's The Prize

摘要

We like to think of art as springing purely from the desire to illuminate. Yet without the artist's ambition to share a poem or play or painting, and without some means of sharing (a publisher, the Internet), these creations would hardly exist. This necessary pull between art and commerce, creation and ambition forms the core of Jill Bialosky's lucid and meditative new work, The Prize (Counterpoint), whose protagonist is a successful art dealer struggling to manage an increasingly fractious painter on his roster, a marriage that's gone slightly off the tracks, and his own troubled past. Bialosky is less interested in taking sides than in presenting complexities, and she does so by stepping away from literature, the world familiar to her as a distinguished poet and novelist and an editor at W.W. Norton.