In an age driven by desire, what happens when you want two different things?
Set in the pristine, precarious world of MoMA, The Modern is a brilliantly wry and insightful debut about art, sexuality, commitment and whether being on the right path can lead to the wrong place.
Things seem to be working out for Sophia in New York: having come from Australia to be at the centre of modernity, she’s working at the Museum of Modern Art, living in a great apartment with a boyfriend interviewing for Ivy League teaching positions. They’re smart, serious, dine in the right restaurants and have (a little unexpectedly) become engaged just before he leaves to hike the Appalachian Trail.
Alone in the city, Sophia begins to wonder what it means to be married – to be defined, publicly – in the 21st century. Can you be true to yourself and someone else? In a bridal shop she meets Cara, a young artist struggling to get over her ex-girlfriend, and the two begin a connection that leads Sophia to question the nature of her relationships, her career and the consequences of being modern.
Both playful and profound, inhabiting the gap between what we feel about ourselves and how we behave, Anna Kate Blair’s debut novel is a sparklingly insightful queer exploration of desire, art and her generation’s place in the world. It announces an exceptional new literary voice.
Anna Kate Blair is an award-winning writer whose essays and short stories have appeared in Archer, Meanjin and The Lifted. Now, she turns her hand to fiction with The Modern, which is an exquisitely crafted, intuitive and insightful debut novel.
Blair has a resonant ability to capture your late twenties through Sophia, who’s on the brink of thirty and navigating moving from ‘promising’ to a woman managing the expectations of others. It’s potent, passionate and illuminating.
Blair’s prose and descriptions are expertly crafted, but still feel instinctive. Her observations are stunningly acute. There are some superbly wry ruminations as Sophia ponders what promise is and what modernism is. Sophia questions why she, and others, who have received a two-year fellowship at MoMA are deemed ‘lucky’: ‘ luckiness flattened out everything, acknowledging neither my own achievements nor the cruel indifference of the institution itself’.
Through Sophia’s lens we feel the frustration and exhilaration of becoming. Of experiencing heartache, negotiating loss and the recalibration of who we thought we were. I felt transported back to that period in my life in a way few other novels have achieved. Anna Kate Blair has delivered a stellar coming-of-age and sexual identity debut.
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