Review: The Modern by Anna Kate Blair

It’s 2016 in New York. Sophia, an Australian art history graduate, is coming to the end of her twenties and the end of a fellowship at MOMA where’s she’s been researching the modern painter Grace Hartigan. Her boyfriend Robert proposes (she says yes) and then he leaves for months to do the Appalachian Trail. While he’s away, Sophia contemplates her future, procrastinates planning her wedding, and encounters Cara, a young artist who works in a bridal store.

Marriage, work, art, love, sex, New York — Blair meticulously deconstructs these eternal motifs with the eye of an art historian, wringing from them a careful, darkly humorous and in the end rather unsettling study of early adulthood. Blurbs rarely have much interesting to contribute to a book, but “it’s time for Sophia to deliver on her promise” superbly conveys the hint of threat that seeps from The Modern.

What’s the source of that threat? Perhaps it is the presidential election that looms beyond the book’s final line. Perhaps its Sophia’s crushes past and present:

I knew that crushes could crush people, that they were passionate, urgent, out-of-control, something contain or conceal. I knew that desire, if it flared in the wrong place, could cost a girl her life.

Perhaps it is the limits Sophia becomes increasingly aware of as soon as she ceases to be a girlfriend and becomes a bride-to-be. She feels these binds keenly because of her queerness, which goes underacknowledged among her peers because she’s in a hetero relationship. “I was afraid,” she says of Robert’s interest in her previous relationships with women, “that I was complicit in the reduction of queer female desire to something performed for a male gaze.” Later she admits that she “needed to feel that the stakes were lower, which they always somehow were with men.”

Blair investigates these ideas through the lens of Modernism, as if the title of the book is a question: the modern what — marriage? love? life? Modernism, Sophia explains, can be defined in several ways, and its multiple meanings slip through the novel. It is an anxious, millenarian slant on the world, contrasted with Robert’s interest in nature writing which, Sophia decides, is “really two sides of one coin, waiting to be flipped”:

we agreed that New York was modernity’s centre, but argued about whether the air we breathed was full of utopian dreams or just automobile exhaust.

I was drawn to The Modern’s conceptual neatness, sustained over the book’s length. There is plenty of modern art in The Modern, but it is Sophia’s attitude, and the way she renders New York scenery into textual pictures that really feels modern. Take, for instance, the sudden appearance of Pokémon Go and the people “gathered on corners in unspeaking clumps”, waving “their phones at the Pokemon living in the sculpture garden”:

I wondered if that was all anybody ever did, search for illusions that offered a sense of meaning, and if the only differences were in the technologies we used and the forms that our illusions took.

The Modern uses it first-person narrative to excellent effect, with the tension building to novel’s biting climax. At first we have no reason to distrust Sophia’s account, but as the gap between what Sophia says and what the people who know her say she brings to mind such great queer characters like Nick Guest in The Line Of Beauty.

Gay rating: 5/5 for queer characters, relationships, sex and themes.