Metropolitan Stories: A Novel

by Christine Coulson Narrated by Jill Eikenberry

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

08/26/2019

Coulson’s sly, whimsical debut takes the form of a collection of connected stories set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art . Grounded in the author’s decades of experience working at the Met, the surreal stories scamper among multiple points of view, both human and other. Ghosts appear, and pieces of furniture and paintings express their opinions. In “Musing,” the museum’s ambitious director seeks a Muse to take to a meeting, auditioning candidates from the Greek and Roman galleries as well as more recently painted Muses, all of whom banter among themselves about him and the auditioning process. In “Big-Boned,” an “underdrawing,” concealed for centuries by the paint of a finished work, slips out to work in the staff cafeteria. “Adam” and “Night Moves” both regard the tumble and fall of a statue, from the views of the statue itself, yearning to wiggle, and the guard who leaves his post by the statue to do the push-ups that he hopes will make him look more manly. The Met that emerges from these stories is both grandiose and cheerfully mundane, a place so packed with wonders that no one person can know them all. Those who think they know the place will be beguiled by the look behind the scenes; those unfamiliar with it will be prompted to make its acquaintance. (Oct.)

From the Publisher

A love letter to the monumental institution…[Metropolitan Stories] reads like a work by John Cheever…[Coulson] captured the spirit of the place and brought it magically to life.” —Wall Street Journal

“Coulson worked at the Met for 25 years…Now, she is writing in her own voice—and sometimes, in the voice of the artworks themselves. Her debut novel, Metropolitan Stories, goes behind the scenes at the museum. It’s a series of loosely connected stories about the people and objects that fill the galleries.” —NPR, “All Things Considered”

“This series of vignettes goes beyond what a casual visitor to the museum might see and offers a witty, enjoyable look at the elegant and sometimes unhinged world that exists within its walls.” —Town and Country, The Must-Read Books of Fall 2019

“A vivid, comedic, tender, and episodic debut…Coulson is emotionally keen, acerbically witty, fleetly imaginative, and lyrically resonant, her love for the Met, for humanness, and for beauty radiant on each surprising page.” —Booklist (starred review)

“[A] sly, whimsical debut…Those who think they know [the Met] will be beguiled by the look behind the scenes; those unfamiliar with it will be prompted to make its acquaintance.” —Publishers Weekly

“Delightful and sharply observed…Coulson’s erudition is worn lightly, and any worry that the Met’s self-importance has rubbed off on her is quickly banished by the author’s sly wit.” —New Criterion

“In this series of loosely linked surreal vignettes, Coulson takes us on a tour of the hidden world that tourists never see…an alternative guidebook to [the Met’s] rich treasures.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Written with elegance, wit, and a flair for comic genius, Metropolitan Stories describes the museum world as it is and as it strives to be. Coulson is a brilliant narrator of the fantastical and the all-too-plausible excesses of curators and museum directors. Her infectious sense of fun, her steady flow of insights into the human heart and its foibles, her wanton but beady-eyed attention to blind ambition, her passion for art itself, and most of all her deep sense of human character make this not only a delightful book, but also a deeply rewarding one. It marks the emergence of a major new talent.” —Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon and Far from the Tree

“Only someone who deeply loves and understands the Metropolitan Museum could deliver such madcap, funny, magical, tender, intimate fables and stories. We are swept away in the museum. Beauty abounds. Yearning too. The art literally comes to life. And it makes perfect sense.” —Maira Kalman, author of The Principles of Uncertainty

“With Metropolitan Stories, Christine Coulson gives us a book as kaleidoscopic and enchanting as the museum it brings so imaginatively to life. Witty, enthralling, and utterly original, this novel is a treasure.” —Caroline Weber, Pulitzer Prize finalist for Proust’s Duchess and author of Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“This book—which is about art but really about life, and the afterlife of art—is a wonder. Coulson reverses the currency between spectator and spectacle, and in the process explodes the idea of how art lives. She accordions time, history, art theory, and the sub-sub culture of a massive public institution into 245 pages of mischievous, heart-tugging, and surreal fancy. My visits to the Met will never be the same.” —Leanne Shapton, National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author of Swimming Studies

“Every painting, every tapestry, every fragile, gilded chair in the Met not only has a story, but gets to tell it, in Christine Coulson’s magical book. The history, humor, wonder, and—perhaps above all—beauty that Coulson absorbed in her twenty-five years at the museum burst forth from these pages, in her wry and imaginative tales of the people and objects that make the Met all that it is.” —Ariel Levy, staff writer for The New Yorker and New York Times bestselling author of The Rules Do Not Apply

“Stories define museums, and none more so than the Met. But it takes imagination as much as knowledge to recognize and appreciate them, as Christine Coulson’s enchanting novel reveals. Melding fact and fiction, art history and autobiography, her strange tales of mutually dependent artworks and caretakers beat with a pulse that oscillates between the real and the unreal, the ordinary and the extraordinary. More than any scholar or connoisseur, Coulson’s exquisite book captures the essence of the Met—its ability to delight, surprise, astonish, and, ultimately, to dream.” —Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge, the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute

Kirkus Reviews

2019-07-15
A 25-year veteran of the Metropolitan Museum of Art makes her fiction debut with a literary homage to the venerable New York City institution.

What really goes on behind the scenes and after hours at a major museum? In this series of loosely linked surreal vignettes, Coulson takes us on a tour of the hidden world that tourists never see: the conservation galleries, the staff cafeteria, the dusty storerooms, and dark tunnels—"the grim bowels below the basement where storage cages made with woven-metal fencing held retired art and cartons of old paperwork." We also meet the Met's eccentric staff and its wealthy patrons. In "Musing," snooty director Michel Larousse, upon learning that Karl Lagerfeld is bringing a muse to a meeting at the Met, scours his museum's collections for his own personal muse. In "The Talent," neurotic curator Nick Morton obsesses about losing prime gallery space to a rival ("My pictures cannot hang on nine-foot walls"). And in "Mezz Girls," lonely, cranky Mrs. Leonard Havering dines at a benefit auction with the troublesome ghost of a previous Met benefactor. And then there's the art: In "Chair as Hero," an 18th-century fauteuil à la reine in the Wrightsman Galleries recalls comforting the distraught young daughter of the Duchess of Parma, and in "Adam," a Renaissance statue craves movement, with disastrous results. Magical realism requires finesse, and while some of Coulson's fables offer a bit of fun whimsy (a time-traveling passageway in "Meats & Cheeses" leads to the Met's 1920 Egyptian expedition), clunky prose too often spoils the mood. ("Rather paltry, he smirked"; " ‘No sweetie,' chomped a showgirl version of Calliope from the European Paintings collection"). Coulson obviously loves her former employer, but her vignettes never add up to more than the sum of their parts. Still, this will sell in the Met's store as an alternative guidebook to its rich treasures.

Don't expect any Night at the Museum hijinks here.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177538457
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	01/07/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

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 would immediately think I’m an asshole, particularly the older Windsor chairs.
Everyone would know that I still have my original upholstery and that I’ve made cameo appearances in a few minor paintings. There’s some cred in that, but also a lot of resentment.
I remember back in Paris when a master carver sculpted me into coils and tendrils, decoration so florid that even my smoothest surface arched into acrobatic movement: swinging, reaching, bounding, wrapping with wisteria determination.
Gold leaf coated each of these spiraling forms. The sheets of the precious metal, impossibly thin, floated onto my exposed wood like a soft rain, cool and tender. Silk velvet was then stretched across my curves, a fine, bespoke suit, taut and precise, with glistening ornament along its edges.
I can picture Louise-Élisabeth’s daughter, Isabella, age eight, on the day I arrived from France at the Ducal Palace of Colorno in Parma. It was 1749, and she stroked my crimson velvet with such care, trying to appear grown up and sophisticated.
But I also remember when she curled herself within my arms and cried fat, messy tears, her knees tucked tightly beneath the panniers of her gown with its flowers and ribbons. I can still feel the heaving of her chest against my back as she shivered gently to the rhythm of her sobs. How I wish I could have swayed along with that pulsing sorrow to comfort her.
Only five years later, Isabella’s siblings, Ferdinand and Maria Luisa, would topple into me during audiences with their parents and pull at my gold trimmings, as clumsy and silly as any children, despite their finery.
One time at the Met, a small boy—not more than three years old—wandered past the barriers in the Wrightsman Galleries and headed straight for me. Almost two hundred and twenty-five years had passed, but he reminded me so much of those toddlers back in Parma.
Come on little guy! I thought from behind the gallery ropes. You can make it! 
The boy’s plump hands extended forward, propelled by his thick, tumbling waddle, his shoes clomping on the gallery floor. I felt like I was hanging from a cliff waiting for him to grip my arm and save me. Then a breeze of moist heat floated past as his mother grabbed him at the very last second—just before he reached me. That was 1978. I still dream about it. I imagine the boy climbing up onto my seat. His pleasant folds and warm, springy pudge nestled between my arms. A small puddle of drool soaking into my velvet, the life of it racing through to my frame.

I would share those dreams in the meetings.
Of course, I remember the lonely attics and warehouses, too. Rooms of swollen heat and shrinking cold. Dark, hollow, airless. A desolate purgatory, despite the stacked and crowded landscape, a bulging mountain range of the stored and forgotten.
In the brittle stillness, dust showered down upon me with a fragile constancy, like some gray and final mist, ashen drifts accumulating on my every surface. For decades, I ached for the feel of footsteps rattling through the floorboards, quivering up my legs, delivering some—any—faint agitation of life. And oh, to be the chosen one when that door finally swung open, the chooser blackened against the blaze of ripe and glorious light! Storage would definitely come up in the meetings, too.
Eventually I landed back in Paris at Maison Leys, the city’s foremost interior decorating firm at the turn of the century. There, in 1906, the legendary connoisseur Georges Hoentschel sold me to the American giant J.P. Morgan, along with two thousand other pieces of furniture. Morgan gave the whole lot of us to the Met, where I will always live in great splendor.
But Parma was my home. I will never forget the light and shadow of those glorious rooms of my youth. Some days I trace every detail in my mind, the way prisoners do to survive captivity. I feel Louise-Élisabeth’s body collapsing onto me, tired and alone: the fearless daughter of a king, frustrated by her timid spouse and hindering lack of beauty. I can still smell the sour odor of her flaccid husband as he picked at my gilding.
Little Maria Luisa eventually became Queen of Spain after she was engaged to her cousin Charles at age eleven. Short and not as pretty as her older sister, her feet swung lazily from my edge as she listened to her mother explain the arrangements of the loveless marriage. As rebellion or consolation, a parade of lovers would later sink into my velvet during Maria Luisa’s reign.
Maria Luisa kept me with her until she died in Rome in 1819. I held her through the fear and tragedy of twenty-four pregnancies over twenty-eight years. Only six babies survived.
I wouldn’t talk about those memories in the meetings.

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