Cara

• This is the circuitous premise of Australian writer Anna Kate Blair’s debut novel, The Modern, set in contemporary New York and centred on the life, half-loves and near-loves of Sophia, an Australian research fellow at MoMA (the Museum of Modern Art).
• Review: The Modern – Anna Kate Blair (Scribner) Sophia’s engagement shakes out a constellation of loose questions about potential choices, possibilities and limitations.
• When Robert departs, Sophia meets the mercurial, filament-like Cara, an unlikely assistant in a little-frequented New York wedding boutique.

Is marriage modern?

• The question “Is marriage modern?” is less the fulcrum of Sophia’s personal narrative than, increasingly, a perplexing nonsense rhyme, or rhetorical question weighed down by its own glowering question mark.
• Is marriage modern?
• In the context of same-sex marriage, which Blair touches upon, marriage is modern, so long as you don’t drill down to its ideological underpinnings: the history of marriage as property transfer, its requisite reproductive labour, the spectacle of grim-lipped, decades-long resentments sustained under the oath of “til death do us part”.
• By what barometer might we gauge “modernity” in marriage?

Smacked in the face by a dress

• A flounce-ridden, gorgeously deep-red wedding dress in a Moonee Ponds wedding boutique window.
• For one second, I entertained the idea of a wedding, but only because of that dress.
• But the phenomenon itself – the overweening presence of the wedding dress in young women’s lives – remains under-explored.

Modern art ‘at every turn’

• If the novel’s central question is not answered or adequately dissected, questions of modernity in art are more fulsomely, if curatorially, examined.
• The Modern tosses “modern” artists and art at the reader at every turn, assuming a familiarity with art history on the reader’s part.
• The Modern overflows with ideas: musings on modern art, and on the masculinist orientation of art institutions, in which female curatorial assistants doggedly do the work their male supervisors put their names to.

Curated, rather than known

• She is curated rather than known; she’s a collection of iterations.
• Perhaps this is Blair’s intention: Hartigan as surface, knowable only through her work, her private self inured to the public gaze.
• But every character in The Modern feels somewhat like a bit-part: fleeting, insubstantial, or, in Robert’s case, downright wooden.