The Improbability of Love by Hannah Mary Rothschild
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I don’t know how to describe this book. It’s the story of a single painting ‘The Improbability of Love’ which is a lost masterpiece. The story of the painting touches many characters and their stories weave through each other’s. There’s head hopping (nicely done, and probably called moving psychic distance, but it still bothers me) reams of information in chunks and various digressions, but it’s so beautifully done and the characters are so compelling that it doesn’t matter.
Annie is a wannabe chef who buys a picture from a junk shop on a whim. Jesse is a museum guide and artist who falls in love with Annie. Rebecca is the second in command at one of the biggest art dealers in the country. There are are scores of characters and I felt for every one of them. Every time we moved from one character to the other, I missed the character I’d just left… until I got sucked back into the life of the character I was reading about now. They’re not all nice people, but they are, all of them, interesting and compelling.
The story itself is a mystery, with commentary on the world of art and the worlds of the super rich. I must admit, it’s not a world I know anything about, so it was fun to read about it. If you know about art, there are probably extra layers of interest in this book.
It’s the sort of book that I read and wish I could write like that.
Rhoda Baxter 