When the sons of Heaven meet the daughters of the Earth

Dolly Gebler, daughter of a Midwestern pharmaceuticals mogul with a mania for collecting art, was raised amongst her father's Flemish Masters and abstract expressionists and is dedicated to the idea that art can change the world. Her husband Alfred is a poor boy from Brooklyn who now has a taste for tequila and nightclubs. Together they form the Aurora Foundation whose mission is to pick out a few artists of genius and bankroll them for life. Into this world comes Isaac Hooker, a 25 year old Harvard drop-out with no real direction to his life. After attending art classes, he stumbles into a job at Aurora and becomes Dolly's genius, for whom she wants to make everything possible. Fernanda Eberstadt's novel succeeds both as a satire of the pretensions and posing of the 1980s New York art world and as a witty, unsentimental portrait of her three central characters.