As Allison Amend's A Nearly Perfect Copy opens in 2007, the art market is on fire, and Elmira "Elm" Howells is the pre-20th-century acquisitions and authentication expert at Tinsley, a small New York auction house founded by her great-grandfather. Her boss (who is also her cousin) is unhappy with her division's sales, though; two years after the death of her son, Ronan, in the South Asian tsunami, Elm is still reeling. Meanwhile, Gabriel Connois, the great-great-grandson of a critically admired minor impressionist artist, is living in a Paris hostel. His original artwork finds no market, but an antiquities broker pays cash for his accomplished sketches, on period-appropriate paper, in the manner of his ancestor's studio.
When Elm contracts with a French human cloning firm in hopes of a successful embryo implant of Ronan's DNA, her need for financial resources leads her to the Paris broker peddling Gabriel's forgeries. She knows they are suspect, but her need trumps her professional integrity. In the convergent paths of these two troubled lives, Amend builds a story of international intrigue and personal dissolution set against the shaky infrastructure of the frenzied, often opaque, pre-Great Recession art market.
Even as an art insider, Amend (author of the story collection Things That Pass for Love and the novel Stations West), notes, "Elm often felt like she was working inside a burlap sack--light filtered in, but not enough to see by." Though it's driven by a somewhat farfetched plot, A Nearly Perfect Copy adeptly explores the ways in which deception often masks the authentic in desperate pursuit of personal ambition--whether financial, artistic or familial. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.