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About Metropolitan Stories: A Novel
Product Description “Only someone who deeply loves and understands the Metropolitan Museum could deliver such madcap, funny, magical, tender, intimate fables and stories.” —Maira Kalman, artist and bestselling author of The Principles of Uncertainty From a writer who worked at the Metropolitan Museum for more than twenty-five years, an enchanting novel that shows us the Met that the public doesn't see. Hidden behind the Picassos and Vermeers, the Temple of Dendur and the American Wing, exists another world: the hallways and offices, conservation studios, storerooms, and cafeteria that are home to the museum's devoted and peculiar staff of 2,200 people—along with a few ghosts. A surreal love letter to this private side of the Met, Metropolitan Stories unfolds in a series of amusing and poignant vignettes in which we discover larger-than-life characters, the downside of survival, and the powerful voices of the art itself. The result is a novel bursting with magic, humor, and energetic detail, but also a beautiful book about introspection, an ode to lives lived for art, ultimately building a powerful collage of human experience and the world of the imagination. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. WE We protect them and save them and study them. After a time, we realize—some of us slower than others—that they are protecting us, saving us, studying us. “We” are generations of golden children, thousands of staff members, raised by the Metropolitan Museum, put in its ward and shaped and stretched until our eyes can spot beauty like we’re catching a ball, quick and needy, clutching it to our chests so it is ours, all ours. Our knees buckle as we learn every one of the museum’s tangled paths—every gallery, every limestone hall, every catwalk and shortcut, every stairway up and down and across and over—until our muscles, tutored and trained, always bend us in the right direction. We dream of chalices and Rothkos, African masks and twisting Berninis unfolding in our minds like so many fluttering pages. Our hearts stutter with their stories, so many stories that words won’t do. We need to show you what we see, what we have woken up, right here, right now, in this shiny box. “They” are the objects, the art, the very stuff of the place. The things the public comes to see and longs for us to sing about, loudly and clearly and with every breath, until the visitors are too inspired, too tired, to see another bronze, another altarpiece, another sword or portrait or vase. After buying a bag of proof in the shop—a sack that says the museum has been done, with Van Gogh napkins to prove it—the visitors leave. We and the objects stay. We have our evenings to cling together and our mornings to reunite. We connect like neighbors across a fence, one side always knowing more; we like to think it’s us, but it’s them. Our hungry scholarship scratches for what they’ve already lived. Those objects were there, saw the whole thing, right in front of them. Watched the tomb door close, pinching the sunlight until it narrowed to one last blinding stripe, then thrrump! Gone. We depend upon their magic, know it like a quiet superstition. The objects glide into our world—once fixed, now moving—each time showing up somewhere we did not expect. Because we did not realize that we needed to be rescued by marble and silk, or canvas and oil paint, or charcoal upon a page, pushing beyond gilded frames and glass cases to reach out and do with us what they will, always for good. Never against us. Those works of art work—to make the right things happen and sweep the wrong things down the steps of the museum in heavy drips that collect and wash away. And we are breathless and relieved to have the art on our side. It is why we never leave. CHAIR AS HERO Sometimes I wish we had a support group. We would start by introducing ourselves. “Hi, I’m a fauteuil à la reine made for Louise-Élisabeth, Duchess of Parma.” The other chairs
