‘All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me,’ by Patrick Bringley

Book Short

‘All the Beauty in the World
The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me‘
By Patrick Bringley

Book Short by Stephanie Miller

After the loss of his beloved older brother, former New Yorker magazine writer Patrick Bringley takes a job as a security guard at the Met in New York City. It’s a good job: union wages, a variety of roles, and although you must learn to stand on your feet for 12-hour shifts, you do it among some of the most amazing human creations in the world.

10 Years with the World’s Best Art

He takes the job to recover and deal with his grief and stays for ten years. He finds that standing alongside artworks of every kind from armor to pottery to painting to furniture helps him sort through his questions of why and how and what for. 

In the process, he shares his love and curiosity and research with us in this memoir, giving us a glimpse of the behind-the-scenes life of those silent, watchful people who are a fixture of every museum.

I’m not sure why it surprised me to learn that of course the guards, like anyone, would be affected by the artwork they stand among every day. Bringley takes us on the ultimate insider’s tour of some of the galleries, sharing the history, craft, and meaning of works that we may have studied ourselves or even walked right past.   

He says, “I have spent hours absorbing art, but what if instead I actively wrestle with it, trying to bring all different aspects of myself to bear on the questions it raises? It seems to me that this is a worthy mission for anybody entering an art museum. After we quiet our thinking mind to experience art, we will want to switch it back on, reassert ourselves, and in that way learn even more.”

Bringley engages his thinking mind to share this well-researched and compellingly personal tour of the Met. 

To conclude one chapter he writes, “Art often derives from those moments when we would wish the world to stand still. We perceive something so beautiful, so true, or majestic or sad, that we can’t simply take it in stride. Artists create records of transitory moments, appearing to stop their clocks. They help us believe that some things are not transitory at all, but rather remain beautiful, true, majestic, sad, or joyful over many lifetimes — and here is proof: painting in oils, carved in marble, stitched into quilts.”

Later, he relates: “When I took up my post ten years ago there were things I didn’t understand. Sometimes life can be about simplicity and stillness, in the vein of a watchful guard amid shimmering words of art. But it’s also about the head down work of living and struggling and growing and creating.” 

Bingley’s time as a guard started as a way to heal and ended as helping him understand how to live. 

Micro Shorts

‘Kin‘
By Tayari Jones

This newish release is a happy-sad novel of two “cradle friends” who grew up motherless together. Vernice and Annie have been best friends in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, since childhood but take wildly different forks in the road as teenagers and wind up in very different lives. Both are committed to the same thing: Replace that lost mother-love and never return to Honeysuckle. Despite the support of a village of wise, witty, and loving aunts, grandmothers, neighbors, and schoolteachers, as well as their own wonderful adventures and romances, neither seems to ever really be happy, and a current of sadness flows through the entire novel until culminating in a giant wave of misfortune at the end. The beauty and constancy of their friendship is a beacon to balance the missing parts of their lives, and the ending tragedy has a hopeful note.

‘On the Calculation of Volume I
A novel by Solvej Balle’
(Translated by Barbara Haveland)

This is the start of a multi-volume novel (VII just came out) revealing the daily diary of rare book dealer Tara Sleter who finds her day of November 18th repeating itself for an entire year.

The deadlocked day is frightening and lonely, and Tara is haggard trying to explain it to herself and others. For almost a hundred days, she explains the situation anew each morning to her confused husband, who is always surprised to wake up on his ordinary day and find her home when she was supposed to be traveling in Paris. After she convinces him that this new reality is real, they try to find hooks or gaps or any clues as to how to restart time for her.

By day #356, she is sorely tried, “It’s hard to be patient when you don’t know what you’re waiting for. It’s hard to spot a difference in the host of incidents in the day.”  You can’t look away from her pain, and yet she manages to keep going, keep testing, keep hoping. And yes, Balle has published seven successful novels of this same woman repeating the same day and has a worldwide bevy of fans. I encourage you to at least check it out!

‘A Respectable Trade‘
By Phillipa Gregory

Celebrated historical fiction writer of the Tudor period, Phillipa Gregory always manages to turn little known characters from the past into fully formed, highly relatable people.

In this novel, she tackles the slave trade in England during the early days of the abolitionist movement fighting back against politicians and merchants whose entire livelihoods — and frankly, most of England’s economy — depended on the sale of African slaves. These merchants know it is a sustainable revenue source, since nearly all Africans conscripted in the Caribbean or North America are dead within four years and need to be replaced.

“The Trade” is a fixture, particularly in Bristol, which is battling for survival against the more prosperous and active port city of Liverpool. In the micro story, Frances Scott escapes gentile servitude after the death of her father by agreeing to marry Josiah Cole, a small trader with big ambitions. Thus, the micro and macro currents swirl in tandem for a rich, lively, historical view of the period when liberty for all was established in England.

‘Whiskey & Charlie’
By Annabel Smith

I found this on the used book stack outside Old Longfellow Books (always a lure drawing me away from my downtown purpose) and it turns out to be an engaging story of twin brothers who gradually grow apart, competing against each other as adults, and never quite understanding their own value. When a terrible accident leaves Whiskey in a coma, Charlie must face his role in their rupture and learn to set aside old hurts to accept the love his family has always offered. It’s a light read of rivalry and redemption, without becoming saccharine or too sentimental.  I always appreciate a clever literary construct, and this novel uses the two-way alphabet as chapter headings, which mostly work through some fancy footwork by the author to make things like X-Ray and Sierra and Uniform fit into this tale of family drama.

‘Lost Lambs’
By Madeline Cash (Debut Novel)

I love a story where the weird, brilliant, teenaged daughter Harper Flynn turns out to be the only one clever and brave enough to tackle a huge criminal conspiracy. At the same time, her obsessions may be the only chance to save her family, now hovering at the breaking point from a combination of rebellious daughters and the parents’ spiraling open marriage.

Madeline Cash’s debut novel Lost Lambs was highlighted in one of the Print: A Bookstore book clubs, tempting me to try a genre that I don’t usually read. This is part magical realism and part mystery-cum-fantasy and part coming of age. It’s completely irreverent and a bit hard to follow as it includes silly mis-spellings and rapid, disconnected jumps between the voices of the Flynn family and the many characters around them, including an online terrorist who has become a sort of e-pen pal to Harper’s sister. Suspend your preconceived notions of how a story is told, and jump in!

‘A Piece of the World‘
By Christina Baker Kline

I read this because it was recommended for a Farnsworth Museum event that featured a many-numbered great-granddaughter of NC Wyeth, so it must be a story that the family and the museum find compelling. It’s a fictionalized memoir of the women in the famous Andrew Wyeth painting, Christina’s World.

Christina Olson had a debilitating muscular illness that baffled the doctors of her day, and she lived her entire life in a very small circle around the family farmhouse in Cushing Maine (which you can visit today as part of the Farnsworth holdings). The prologue sets the tone and scale for the entire novel: “Later [Andrew] told me he’d been afraid to show me [Christine] the painting. He thought I wouldn’t like the way he portrayed me: dragging myself across the field, fingers clutching dirt, my legs twisted behind. That dilapidated house in the distance, looming up like a secret that won’t stay hidden. {…} People think the painting is a portrait, but it isn’t. Not really.”

‘Best Offer Wins’
By Marisa Kashino

Anyone caught up in the real estate race in a sellers market can understand the extremes Margo Miyake considers as she makes getting the perfect home central to her personal happiness. Home, baby, life is her mantra after her six-figure bids above asking price are repeatedly shunned in favor of all cash offers. This debut novel races along a five week period of her escalating mania when her dream home is coming online, and I found myself actually rooting for her as she rapidly unhinges – moving from stalking to trespassing to blackmail to murder. A perfect beach read!

‘The Sari Shop‘
By Rupa Bajwa

It takes a lot of energy and perseverance to move up the class/economic ladder in any society, and this debut novel of modern India chronicles the path of sari shop clerk Ramchad who aspires to learn English, keep his rented room clean, and stop oversleeping and get to work on time. Hailed as satire of the striving middle class, this story of a poorly educated but highly moral man struggling to figure out if there is more to life than what he’s got has a strong rhythm and a compelling plot that climaxes and resettles in an unflinching, heartbreaking, but purely realistic way.