Metropolitan Stories: a novel by Christine Coulson. Other Press| October 2019| 241 pages | $23.00| ISBN: 978-159051-058-2

RATING: *****/5*

I loved this so much and devoured it during a leisurely day of reading. I couldn’t put it down. It’s a love story to art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art told through a series of vignettes. The stories range from amusing to surreal to fanciful to melancholy. The novel brings art to life through detailed descriptions and creative scenarios whether it’s personifying a chair, a drawing (“I am part of the Met’s collection, yet totally invisible.”) or a sculpture (“All the art in the Met could move, but not until it had to.”) Characters include curators, lampers, museum directors, security guards and even an older man who kept the paper gift bags folded and organized. Author Christine Coulson utilizes her vast knowledge of the inner workings of the Met and melds art history, museum subculture and personal experience.

In “Musing” a museum director searches for a muse to bring to an event. There’s a casting call with all the available muses in the museum department by department–“A major crease in the shoe was Michel’s long-held disinterest in American art.” An assistant in the development office delivers inter-office mail in “Meats & Cheeses.” Staff refers to inter-office envelopes as “cheese.” The assistant has this brilliant observation: “I had only worked at the Met for a year, but its strange cocktail of confident superiority and tolerated eccentricity had introduced me to a promised land.”

“The Gift Man” is about a famous photographer who takes pictures of a major donor after he makes a particularly news-worthy gift to the museum. Turns out that 85% of the museum’s collection is procured through donation. A security guard hears and feels whatever a painting depicts in “Night Moves.” If it’s a snowy scene, he feels cold. Of a war scene: “For him, the metal echoed with the howls of battles and death and smelled of burning corpses and ravaged flesh.” The young women of the development office, at a fancy fundraising event, center “Mezz Girls” —“The Met had convened its club and this benefit to raise money for building the collection felt like its actual dance.” In “The Lehman Wing,” a wealthy Walter Lehman left his collection to the Met in 1969 with the requirement that it be assembled exactly as his house.  A man who recently lost his job spends his time in the museum and gets lost in that wing.

I’ve applied to the Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum many times. I have development and communications experience but lack the art history degree and/or art experience that most employees likely possess. That’s clear from reading Metropolitan Stories.

Christine Coulson will be appearing at Boston Public Library on November 21, 2019

–review by Amy Steele

FTC Disclosure: I received this book for review from Other Press.