Seth Panich has established quite an impressive dossier. Panich directs plays for UA, has written several, including the impressively choreographed basketball-on-stage play, “Separate and Unequal,” all produced in New York Off-Broadway, and directs the MFA Acting Program.
One might expect his debut novel to be set in and around theatre, and in a sense it is. The protagonist of “Antique” is Grace Schaffer, holder of a Ph.D. in art history, a professional appraiser who has fallen on difficult times. (The most appealing and foolproof of all plots, featuring athletes or artists, is the come-back story, and Grace needs to come back.)
Grace is filled with self-doubt. She had been a television star, an appraiser on the fantastically popular “Antiques Roadshow,” but a dramatic, really sensational public falling-out with her unfaithful husband, Victor, has her out of that job and touring with a lesser outfit, the struggling “Appraisal Experts Roadshow,” which sets up tents around the country. It’s the county fair, not Ringling Brothers.
Grace is approached by a young woman with an antique necklace that contains a blue stone, lapis lazuli, in the shape of a celestial globe—that is, the cosmos and the stars, which seem to be twinkling bits of gold. The value is probably about 15 dollars but Grace blurts out $2,500. She doesn’t know why. Grace buys the stone and makes a series of outlandishly high evaluations—somehow stating the worth of the object in emotional, sentimental, cosmic terms, not strictly market value.
Does the necklace, the stone, have magic power? It sometimes warms, even sends her messages. Grace’s career is now possibly in even more trouble, but her gross overvaluations seem to be validated, and then she comes upon a British, late nineteenth-century Impressionist painting, perhaps worth a fortune.
Is it genuine, or a brilliant copy? The blue stone can’t tell her. Now Grace has to trust her own judgment, not ever easy for her. She is estranged from her mother, her husband has abandoned her and her aloof father was a kind of American Bernard Berenson, an Olympian authority on these paintings.
And, dramatically, has she found her “grail”?— the fabulous object every art expert, appraiser, researcher, hopes to find once in a lifetime: the Rembrandt in an old garage, the holograph manuscript with the title “Love’s Labors Found.” The drama heightens. Her investigation takes her to England and there are some clever revelations and counter-revelations regarding the potentially invaluable painting, and, finally, a climactic auction at Sotheby’s.
Without aid of car crashes or melodrama, “Antique” is gentle but compelling. Panitch has made use of one of the great tricks of novel writing—fresh subject matter. It’s not Hemingway’s big game hunting or bullfighting, but the mostly gentle world of antiquing and appraising, and especially the auctions, has its own lore, vocabulary and high drama.
