Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.It’s hard to write a story set in today’s commercial art world without running into roadblocks of cliché and caricature. It’s a marketplace of extremes: staggering sums of money, mysterious dealings, plenty of glamour and plenty of grubbiness, visions of great beauty, generosity matched by greed, larger-than-life players. So the risk of overwriting is especially acute when a novel such as The Violet Hour, James Cahill’s second, sets out to plumb the foibles and the darker machinations — as well as the occasional glories — of this weirdly compelling milieu.Cahill doesn’t make it easy for himself: his cast plays right into the prescribed roles. He gives us the ruthless dealer Claude Berlins, whose response to art is expressed purely in dollar signs. The ubiquitous supercurator Fritz Schein, always somehow involved. A fawning auctioneer, Florian Roth, dead set on getting his hands on the collection of mega-rich octogenarian collector Leo Goffman for the sale of the century. Lorna Bedford, whose gallery was the first home of Thomas Haller, the rising superstar artist at the centre of this complicated tale of venality and longing, status-jockeying and love.The love in question is mostly homoerotic: Lorna pines for her younger partner, Justine; Thomas has a sexual history with Claude, but these days enjoys sadomasochistic trysts in a shabby bar close to his glamorous mountain hideaway home in Montreux. It’s a spectacular house, a starchitect’s fantasy cut into the rock overlooking Lake Geneva, whose only visitor has been the photographer from Architectural Digest.Cahill’s uphill task is to make us care, even a little, about these cut-out characters. Along the way, we have to negotiate some absurdly fruity writing — someone only has to make coffee for us to read that the “swarming grounds were mounting a resistance”.However, Cahill pulls it back from the brink. There is real feeling in some of the relationships, especially that between artist Thomas and his first champion, Lorna. Both are gay but they once, many years ago, managed to create a baby son whom Lorna put up for adoption, and whose memory resonates through these pages. So when a beguiling young man called Luca turns up as an assistant at Claude’s gallery, and Thomas begins an intense relationship that ends in tragedy, and Lorna can’t prevent herself from wondering . . . no, no, that would be too neat.Meanwhile, there’s Thomas’s up-and-down career. In the million-dollar Montreux house, the gleaming studio stands empty, the artist void of inspiration, until the intrusion of an angry young videographer, set on filming the fashionable artist, and at the same time an appointment to represent Switzerland at the Venice Biennale. A scene in which Thomas sets fire to everything he’s made for the great event in his swimming pool with cans of petrol is a highlight.What writer can resist Venice? Cahill indulges his penchant for luscious descriptions, but also cleverly brings his dramatis personae together, as if on a theatre set, at a lavish lunch party to celebrate Thomas’s exhibition.One thing Cahill gets absolutely right is the way in which even insiders of the self-obsessed art world talk about it as a separate entity, always located at one remove from themselves. Leo says of fixer Fritz: “That man is the art world”; art critic Joel Blair says to the moody and reluctant Thomas: “You think you can escape from the art world . . . but you’re it.”But — are we reading a full-on parody here? Take this: “[art critic] Carter Daily spoke of the show’s anarcho-pluralism. The word kaleidoscopic passed up and down the table, gaining and losing a sparkle of irony. Thomas seemed not to be listening. Two prawns lay on his plate with a sprig of rocket.”Surely a send-up? Yet Cahill wants us to feel for these people, at least some of the time. Descriptions of the ageing Leo, alone in his sumptuous New York apartment, his skinny hind parts being lowered on a hoist into his swimming pool by his loyal carer Bonita, are genuinely touching. Even so, we also hear Leo saying things like: “I’ve never been political. Although, back in the seventies, my wife did host a meeting for Black Panthers at our duplex on Park.”By the end, Cahill brings many of his characters to some self-recognition. In Venice, the artistic soul of Thomas Haller becomes a battle-of-sales between Lorna, his only reasonably true friend, and sleek uber-dealer Claude. Has Thomas become “the moneyed ghost of his earlier self”, his work outsourced to a fabricator? No spoilers here. In the end, this is a novel about a struggle for integrity, and that is how it finds its own.The Violet Hour by James Cahill Sceptre £18.99, 368 pages Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X
