A satire on the American art world: One Woman Show, by Christine Coulson, reviewed

Christine Coulson worked for more than 25 years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she wrote hundreds of wall labels. In One Woman Show, her second novel, she tells the tragicomic life story of a Wasp-ish porcelain girl called Kitty Whitaker almost entirely in the same 75-word format as if she were an artwork.

The 20th-century tale is presented as an exhibition, made possible, we’re told on the opening page, by ‘gin, taffeta and stock dividends’. It’s a wonderfully clever concept, and a book that lends itself to being read in a single sitting, during which you’ll feel the corners of your lips curl upwards again and again.

We first meet Kitty – or Caroline Margaret Brooks Whitaker, as she’s formally known – aged five, in 1911, together with her parents, Minty and Whit. Even at a young age ‘she knows she is being watched, and adjusts herself to advantage’. Hers is the life of a Park Avenue princess, dusted with ‘glitter and gloss’, though ‘a hum of humiliation jitters below the surface’. At the tender age of ten, Kitty senses ‘a suffocating tyranny on the horizon. Not the war in Europe, but the fragile need to be forever cared for according to someone else’s tastes and appetites’.

After school and ‘a Rose Period of collegiate passion and endeavour’, she’s paired with William ‘Bucky’ Wallingford III, the mining pharaoh of Pittsburgh, at an Egyptian-themed cotillion. He proposes, and she moves into his two-storey apartment on Fifth Avenue, ‘electrified by the prospect of being installed as the centrepiece of this new dynastic collection’. They try and fail to have children (enter Kitty’s Blue Period), and when Bucky is sent to Europe during the second world war and never returns, she becomes ‘static, stiffened’ – at least until she finds the first of a few ‘alternative couplings’.

And so, the life of the ‘bored, rich, porcelain’ girl goes on, with bouts of loneliness soothed by second and third marriages. In time, fine cracks begin to appear on Kitty’s surface, and her glaze yellows and hardens from years of being on display, at the whim of others, little more than a possession. Maybe her former maid, Mrs Greene, was right when she said that Kitty was ‘just another surface to be dusted, perhaps polished, perhaps with white gloves, but really only dusted’. Nevertheless, amid Coulson’s wry, often humorous, occasionally poignant commentary are moments of transgression and longing that show there’s more to our neoclassical heroine than her fine finish.