The nude A novel

What is the relationship between power and desire, art and value, history and responsibility? These questions drive this debut novel in which Elizabeth Clarke, a mid-career art historian on the precipice of a big promotion, arrives in Greece in 1999 to acquire an important sculpture for an American museum. While there, her hunger for the statue, and for her young translator and his wife, cracks open her emotional fragility and self-doubt, which are usually repressed through a careful cocktail of prescription pills and regulated eating. The protagonist's profession grants her license to observe and remark upon carefully curated visual details--such as expensive bed linen draped over the edge of a mattress or figs smothered in honey--that create a romanticized world. But Elizabeth's perception is shattered as strange happenings begin to occur around the statue, and she must confront her role in taking the statue away from Greece. Today, as questions around the repatriation of museum objects fill the news, this book offers sensual engagement with heady matters.

Lindley's enticing first novel explores the seamy side of the antiquities market. Soon after a fisherman reels in a stunning marble figure near a small Greek island, Dr. Elizabeth Clarke, a 30-something American specialist in female Hellenistic statues, arrives to assess it. The nude form, which is missing two arms, could be the perfect focal point at the Los Angeles museum where she's an assistant curator. Her boss, William, pressures her to make the acquisition, claiming that if she fails, her "coldness will be to blame." The stress exacerbates her chronic migraines, but her mood improves after she meets her translator, Niko, and his wife, Theo. Eager to connect with the enchanting Theo, Elizabeth pretends to understand her elliptical statement about the statue being"complicit" in its "un-freedom." Elizabeth loses herself to the island and the couple, imagining they want to sleep with her and failing to grasp Theo's much different ideas about what should be done with the statue (the details come out later). Things take a turn when one of the statue's missing arms mysteriously appears and vandals begin breaking into local museums. Lindley expertly dials up Elizabeth's paranoia and keeps the reader guessing as her mission's true purpose is thrown into question. This one's hard to shake. (July)