Article originally published in the Greenwich Sentinel

The High Season, by Judy Blundell

Ah, the Hamptons. So much a part of my life when I lived in the city and worked in the art world. I can easily flash back to a night at the annual Parrish Museum fundraiser dinner at the table of a client, a New York real estate mogul with an endearing stutter who had taken a group of us sailing that day. I remember talking to an artist I dearly wanted to represent and her famous curator husband who was recommending one of his friends for my gallery. All of our heads swiveled away from each other when Gavin Brown walked in with Elisabeth Peyton, who headed straight for Michael Lynn, who was talking to one of my artists. Everyone had someone whose attention they wanted more. It may have seemed all chummy and friendly under that tent eating rubber chicken, but it was pure transaction tarted up as “loving art.” And, what were we transacting? Money, yes, but also the intangibles: access, coolness, power and connection. We were all using each other to advance ourselves, and I was as big a user as the rest of them. It was our culture far more so than culture itself.

WhenThe High Seasonby Judy Blundell came out, I snatched it up. I love art world fiction: the outsized egos, the fabulous settings, the self-serving and manipulative behavior. The art world always makes a good backdrop for fiction and now that so much of the action has migrated to the North Fork, like when the galleries moved from SoHo to Chelsea, the opportunity of this book was ripe for the picking.

The setup is this: Ruthie, the director of a non-profit gallery, inherited a plum summer house that she can only afford to live in year round if she rents it out for the “high season.” Enter the renter: Adeline, the widow of a blue chip artist who Ruthie used to work for when she and her now ex husband were starving artists in the city. Adeline gets involved with the ex, the teenage daughter Jen gets involved with the son-in-law and chaos ensues. Add to that a hedge fund billionaire with a penchant for hoodie-wearing meditation, a museum worker with a secret life as a social media paparazzo, and a bad boy artist specializing in ironic pool toys and bouncy castles, and the plot boils like a lobster pot.

In many ways, this in the Platonic ideal of a beach read: fraught romances between adults, teens and twenty-somethings alike, an iconic setting that is just accessible enough to think you might visit one day, townies vs. summer renters, evil trophy wives vs. imperiled single moms, and a eccentric rich dude who treats life like a chess game, only winnable by him sitting on top of the story (in his hoodie) like the cherry on a sundae. The bad guys get their comeuppances and the good guys get what they need, which isn’t always what they want.

I like that the main character, Ruthie, who is someone life beats up forcing her to figure out—like all people in their midlife will eventually need to do—what she really wants. She kills her dragons and makes the changes (even the ones she swears she never will) that free her to be her true self. In short, this reads like wicked fun, but has a central core of wisdom, which, at the end of the day is what we all really want on the beach: to escape and be inspired to be ourselves.