LATE AND SOON
By Robert J. Hughes

Publishers Weekly:

A Sotheby's art specialist must arrange a career-making auction of 19th-century paintings, reconsider the loss of her marriage and negotiate the possibilities of new romance in Hughes's mannered, elegant debut. At an art opening one evening, Claire, 32, encounters Tobias, the man her ex-husband, Peter, left her for, and learns that that Peter has dumped Tobias, too. Claire can offer sympathy but not much attention: she has her own still-wounded heart to think about, and she's tied up in securing two paintings by James Tissot (a "first-rate second-tier artist") for her auction from Elizabeth Jane Driscoll, an octogenarian widow with undeserving heirs. To both women, the paintings bear the symbolic weight of memory and desire. Also in the picture is Peter's brother, Frank, a former priest who arrives in New York with a confused affection for Claire, and spunky Bernice Carton, who collects art by collecting husbands. Hughes, a Wall Street Journal reporter who's covered the auction market, depicts the meeting of art and commerce with an insider's keen eye, and it is this part of the book that fascinates most. Claire's emotional twists and turns, rendered in ornamental prose attuned to the slightest shift in feeling or nuance, are less novel but nevertheless affecting in this credible tale of longing and hope.

The Wall Street Journal:

THERE IS a scene in "Late and Soon" in which a wealthy collector, a tough-minded widow with two "ungrateful children," confides to a Sotheby's dealer her desire to find a proper home for her art by selling it before she dies. One is reminded of the tough-minded widow in Henry James's "The Spoils of Poynton," who spends most of that novel trying to guide her own beautiful objects away from a wayward son and a philistine daughter-in-law. She might have saved herself a lot of trouble by selling, too.

Robert J. Hughes's first novel -- Mr. Hughes is a Journal reporter, by the way -- has Jamesian overtones in more than just this scene. The Sotheby's dealer who accepts the widow's confidences is one of a group of cultivated New Yorkers who perform a kind of roundelay of desire, misalliance and reformation. Fine art serves as the center of the story's commercial activity and as its mise-en-scene -- one of the paintings under bidding pressure, for instance, is Tissot's "The Widow." The central actors in the drama possess, in Jamesian fashion, elevated taste, nuanced feeling and, for all that, inconvenient emotion of the sort that breaks through smooth social surfaces.

At one point in "Late and Soon," it is said of Tissot that he could give to different painterly subjects "a similarity of mental texture." The auction-house dealer in the novel, a woman named Claire, is later prompted by a conversation with her ex-husband to ponder her own state of mind, its mental texture. Below, an excerpt from that internal soliloquy:

"She felt that her lingering memories of time, her expectations of being with people, the pleasure or tedium of company or the appraisal of behavior -- before, during, later -- shifted, depending on the memory, the remembrance, the denial, the absurdity of the day, or the time of the memory's recall. People were never wholly one thing to Claire, or they were for too long that one thing. They were shifting representations of her attitude toward them based on their actions, her moods, her building preconceptions. Some friends were better for her for their being known -- or being maintained -- through one form of communication only, through e-mail or telephone. Others were dear for being distant, with intense days of visiting and relief at parting. Others, fewer, were alive to her variously. Just as we know our family through the hectic formative years we have spent together, and carry those sensations, physical, mental, emotional, with us far into our adult lives, with those thoughts rarely changing an underlying disposition toward sister or brother or cousin, so, too, do we react only to an aspect of a person we love, or an incident that has charmed or flattered or repelled us, she thought. So few people existed for Claire as being beyond a function in her life; she rarely thought to consider that other people were fully as human as herself. To her -- and she occasionally realized this -- they existed only partially in the `now' of any encounter with her, and were judged according to that fixed idea."

Adriana Trigiani, author of BIG CHERRY HOLLER:

I fell in love with LATE AND SOON. The novel's details and emotional truths are beautiful and heartfelt. I can't wait to recommend him to my readership.

David Ebershoof, author of THE DANISH GIRL and PASADENA:

LATE & SOON is a novel about love, loss, and the beauty - and limits - of art. With an acute eye and ear, Robert Hughes has etched the players of the New York City art world with precision, a touch of acid, and deep emotional insight. He is a wise and perceptive writer of many talents, perhaps none greater than his ability to observe and render the truth.