The Improbability of Love

All that matters is that artists keep reminding mortals about what really matters: the wonder, the glory, the madness, the importance and the improbability of love.

The Improbability of Love begins with an intriguing prologue: the fabulously wealthy – from an Emir and his Sheikha, to a rapper, museum curators, and billionaire Russian exiles – gather for an art auction at which a recently recovered lost masterpiece is expected to shatter all previous sales records. The story then rewinds to six months earlier and we meet Annie – a recently heartbroken thirty-one year old transplant to London, desperately lonely and dreaming of starting a catering company – as she enters a junk shop, and on a thoroughly uneducated hunch, pays £75 (that she can't really afford) for a small, grimy painting as a gift for a new lover who never bothers to show up for the birthday dinner she has cooked for him. The reader understands that this is the same painting that will eventually turn the art world on its ear, and the story of how it goes from junk shop to auction block is a worthy premise. Unfortunately, the rest of the book did not live up to its early promise for me. Chapter Six begins like this:

Let me guess what you are thinking. Girl finds picture; picture turns out to be worth a fortune. Girl (finally) finds boy with a heart. Girl sells picture, makes millions, marries boy, all live happily ever after. Piss off. Yes, you heard, piss off, as the cake tin at Bernoff's used to say (it was decorated with Renoir's Les Parapluies, which explains quite a lot). Life is not that simple.

This is the first time that we get a chapter from the perspective of the painting itself (an early eighteenth-century Antoine Watteau titled The Improbability of Love; an imagined work by a real artist), and the degree to which you find that clever or charming will likely determine your enjoyment level with this book. As for moi, I was willing to go with it at first, but as Annie brought her painting around to various art experts – who bored me with their The DaVinci Code / CSI level info-dumping about the technical aspects of old paintings – I was further bored by the use of the painting to either confirm the experts' suspicions or to infodump to me the painting's hidden history (this painting is apparently such a perfect representation of true love that it has been sold and stolen repeatedly throughout its three hundred year history to be presented to potential suitors). I was totally over the concept by Chapter Eleven, here in its entirety:

Hello.
I am still here.
And let's not forget that I am the hero of this story.
And far more interesting than food.
And longer lasting than love.
I am still here. 

Moi. I don't understand the screwy formatting on this site.

Just. No. 

Author Hannah Rothschild is, indeed, from the famous Rothschild family, and as she has a long history with the inner workings of the Art World, I am completely prepared to believe that the underbellies of galleries and auction houses are the cut-throat cesspools that she describes. I also defer to her on all matters technical and historical regarding the painting of both old masterpieces and modern art. But I don't think she's a great writer of fiction. I found this plot to be predictable and annoying (I kept sighing at the end of every chapter, not looking forward to starting another), Rothschild relied heavily on coincidence (when even characters are surprised to discover major coincidences – OMG! The painting was sitting in a plastic bag on the counter the entire time I was looking for clues about it in the drawers and on the computer!! OMG! Annie wants to be a caterer and Jesse grew up acting as a sous-chef to his Chef Mom!! – the author is straining credibility), she introduces characters (like the Russians) that you think will eventually become important, but after disappearing for the longest time, they reemerge in the background, and although I do love a book with challenging vocabulary, it honestly felt like Rothschild wrote this book with a thesaurus by her side, trying to inorganically shoehorn in ten dollar words, in order to up her book's intelligence. The first time I read “unbiddable” I thought about how that's a great and underused word, but then she used it a few more times, also using words like peripatetic, putti, and uxorial repeatedly, and the repetitions killed me. While I'm complaining about repetitions, I didn't need to be told over and over that Annie's auburn curls were like a halo, that a piece of art is worth “whatever the market will bear”, or that Watteau's unrequited love was named Charlotte “but her stage name was Colette”. Got it all the first time. I found the characters to be shallow and without distinct voices, the love story to be beyond “improbable” (Jesse may have been struck by love at first sight, but Annie was so cold and rude to him that I can't imagine why he pursued her to such lengths), and found both the trumped-up criminal charges and James Bond subterfuge at the end to be totally unbelievable. And what about the offense for non-Brits? Bad enough that Rothschild denigrates both Wales and Scotland, but all Russians are murderous kleptocrats at heart, Middle Eastern petromonarchs have more money than brains, a group of Japanese tourists at a gallery need to be told what the Mona Lisa is, and as a Canadian, this light-hearted jab left me cold (pun intended):

Of course I know about the Watteau – you'd have to be living in Nova Scotia with your head up a polar bear's bum to have avoided it.

(I'm only half-kidding about being offended by that, but there are certainly no polar bears in Nova Scotia, so why couldn't Rothschild have bothered to get the reference right?) After opening with the auction scene (still my favourite part of the book), I was let down by not returning there in the end; the results of the auction are recapped in a short newspaper article. And then, at the very end, the painting lists off one of those over-the-credits “This person went on to...” and “So-and-so ended up...”, and as much as I didn't like the technique, I also wasn't satisfied where anyone ended up, and I particularly didn't understand Annie's fate. **spoiler** Not only did I not understand why she would move to America when her job offer would have died with Mrs Appledore, but why would she have turned down the million pound finder's fee for the painting? I understand that money can't buy happiness, but incomprehensible nobility don't pay the bills. **end/spoiler**

So, no, I just didn't like this book (note that I haven't included any passages of writing that I did admire) and am mystified as to how The Improbability of Love made the shortlist for the 2016 Bailey's Prize.

I am delighted that The Glorious Heresies won the Bailey's Prize: the best of an uneven but respectable shortlist; here in my ranking order.

The 2016 Bailey's Prize shortlist:

Lisa McInerney: The Glorious Heresies
Anne Enright: The Green Road
Elizabeth McKenzie: The Portable Veblen
Cynthia Bond: Ruby
Hannah Rothschild: The Improbability of Love
Hanya Yanagihara: A Little Life