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Synopsis
Fair Warning is acclaimed novelist Robert Olen Butler's enthralling glimpse into a Manhattan auction house that caters to the shopping pheromones of the rich and powerful. At age forty, the company's charismatic star employee, Amy Dickerson, is capable of selling a Renoir painting of a pudgy nude for twice its value. Her customers are intoxicated by the objects they covet. And sometimes, such as when the dark and mysterious Trevor locks eyes with Amy as she closes an auction with "fair warning," that object is Amy herself. Selected as a Book Sense 76 title and as a New York Times Summer Reading title, "[Fair Warning] is as frank and sassy as its heroine." -- Amanda Heller, The Boston Globe "Engaging ... fascinating ... accompanied by the wealth of evocative detail one might expect from a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize." -- Les Standiford, The Miami Herald "Once again, [Butler's] language is right on the money in this alternately witty and moving meditation on value and values." -- Ron Charles, The Christian Science Monitor "Butler has created one of the more fascinating female protagonists in recent history." -- Kirkus Reviews "Fair Warning deserves our praise, but its author also deserves our gratitude, for his continued risk-taking and stubbornly singular sensibility." -- Todd Kliman, The Washington Post
Book Magazine
In a culture of collectors, you are what you buy. At least, such would seem to be the philosophy of the New York auction world, as evoked through Butler's latest novel. Unfortunately, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author hasn't bothered to flesh out his typecast characters, to make them convincing as more than fictional figments. Butler explains in his acknowledgments that the idea for the book came from director Francis Ford Coppola, who asked him to write a story about a female auctioneer. The result is narrator Amy Dickerson, a native Texan and former model. Moving from auction to auction, the plot concerns the attempt of a mysterious French tycoon to add Amy to his collection, while making portentous pronouncements such as "We choose the objects around us to discover who we are." With the failed marriages of her mother and sister giving her little to envy, Amy, while finely attuned to the connoisseur's mentality, resists commodifying herself. This story could well make for a provocative film, but it lacks the depth to sustain itself as a novel.
—Don McLeese