An Un-Calibrated Centrifuge

I picked this book thinking it would be a light fun read, but in the end I only finished it because I had less than 100 pages to go.

There's a lot of white lady ignorance throughout the book (very reminiscent of The Time Traveler's Wife where a Korean woman is actually described as having a flat face). At the beginning I thought Shapiro wasn't going to mention anyone's race (which is OK by me because it makes it easier for me to imagine everyone as not white), but the Ella comes along and she's a buff black woman sent to protect our (wilting, white) protagonist as she heads into court. Round this out with a Tokyo gallery whose name Claire can't pronounce (I'm pretty sure that's code for the author doesn't want to bother coming up with a name that sounds plausible for a Japanese gallery) and all the race stuff left me with a gross feeling in my stomach.

On top of that the writing is pretty bad. Way too much telling and not enough showing. The romantic relationship happened so quickly, I didn't buy it at all (Claire tells us that Aiden is sexy twice, they have one dinner date and then they're having sex all the time... oh, OK). Claire insists on page 320 that she's a person who likes to know everything, but I didn't really get that from the last 320 pages of the novel. Claire also has no qualms about lying to people but is above stealing things (I thought the covert stealing of documents was a staple in novels like these, but I'm basing this off a half reading of Possession by AS Byatt so maybe I'm wrong).

The plot is ridiculous also. The mystery doesn't really come into play until about halfway through the novel. The pacing is terrible. The flashbacks were annoying. Flashbacks should lead to a revelation of some kind. If they just lead the reader to information they already know, they're redundant. Claire is clearly ostracized in the art community at the start of the book. Skip the flashbacks, condense that info into a few paragraphs and info dump it somewhere. Like, the parallels between the past and the story being told in the novel aren't that great. It wouldn't have affected that much to reduce the impact of Isaac and his painting.

I can't tell if this is the kind of novel where there are supposed to be twists, and they were so badly executed I just saw through all of them, or if this is the kind of novel where you're supposed to know everything as the reader and watch as the characters figure things out. I just know that I was really frustrated with the last seventy pages or so because I knew how everything was going to turn out, and I was just waiting for the characters to catch up.

I don't really know how this problem could be solved. The letters from Belle pretty much spelled out the mystery for me, but I think cutting them all together doesn't leave readers enough evidence to follow the story in the present. Overall, I think the novel would just have to be completely rewritten for me to like it. Shapiro clearly has some talent, but that almost makes the book more frustrating. Why was the writing so inconsistent?

I will say that the idea was strong enough to keep me reading despite all these issues I had with the book. I picked this book up because I really enjoyed The Forger's Spell (super interesting book about Han Van Meegeren). If you're looking for a thrilling story about art forgery consider picking that one up instead. It's nonfiction, but it tells a better story than The Art Forger.