Mostly Martha: Philip Galanes’s ‘Emma’s Table’

The woman’s face is obscured, cut off just below the nose, but the imperiousness of her expression is clear enough from the firm set of her mouth, her lips painted Joker red. Clad in a tailored scarlet coat, she wears outsize pearls at her throat and on her earlobes, a glittering rock on her right hand. In her arms is a pink-collared lapdog, all pampered perfection.This artful creature, who adorns the crimson cover of “Emma’s Table” (Harper, 288 pages, $23.95), might be mistaken for the late queen of the Helmsley Palace, if not for her incongruous blond flip. But it’s that hair color — not even the style, just the color — that’s the clue to what lies inside Philip Galanes’s contemporary comedy of manners.Mr. Galanes, a lawyer-interior decorator-writer, stipulates in the novel’s second sentence that his driven heroine, Emma Sutton, is a brunette, but it is nearly impossible to imagine her that way. From the first chapter, when we see her stalking around a downtown auction house in stealthy pursuit of a Nakashima table, she is a barely disguised Martha Stewart, as famous and worshipped and vilified as the real-life model.“Her allure had always been easy to see: she was just like you, only better — which was somewhat at odds with the latest feather in her cap, a conviction for tax evasion and lying under oath, complete with a stay in the federal pen.” It is not possible to get through page 1 without acquiring the clef to this roman, a beach-ready confection that has some A/C factor built in: It’s set in New York in February.Post-incarceration, Emma is increasingly aware that her ruthless, charred-earth method of doing things is not exactly working out for her anymore. Floating through Manhattan, buffered by a coterie of family and hired help, she has begun to feel something akin to emptiness, a nascent yearning to be a better human being. This does not stop her from terrifying her minions or ignoring her daughter, or from unnecessarily backstabbing a perfectly lovely stranger who’s eyeing the table she covets at the auction. That last sin, however, turns out to be the catalyst for the redemption that (it’s no spoiler to divulge) awaits her at novel’s end.Emma is the central character of Mr. Galanes’s tale, but it’s her assistant, Benjamin, who takes the novel to the outer boroughs. He works weekends for Emma to supplement the paltry salary he earns as a social worker at a public elementary school in Queens, where a dreamy, smart, stoic girl named Gracie is in desperate need of adult intervention.Nine years old, 4-1/2 feet tall, and 114 pounds, she is a magnet for bullying. She’s also a secret eater who wolfs forbidden junk food to anesthetize the pain of social ostracism. How she is getting this food is a mystery to Benjamin, but he swiftly decides he has found the culprit: Gracie’s young single mother, Tina. He is wrong, as the reader knows all along; his suspicion stems from his issues with his own mother — issues with, and of, mothers being dominant themes in the novel. But Benjamin feels for the child and, to Mr. Galanes’s credit, so do we. The story line about Gracie and Tina is just as absorbing as the more glamorous plot unfolding on the Upper East Side, where Emma lives with her slightly spineless ex-husband, Bobby.Newly returned to Emma after seeing her brought low behind bars, Bobby is no more decisively committed to their reconciliation than he was to their long-ago marriage. Meanwhile, their 34-year-old daughter, Cassy, is a lost soul so hungry for her mother’s attention and approval that she loathes Benjamin for getting even a crumb of it.Emma, fawned over though she is, would never win the presidential race; no one would ever want to have a beer, or even a coffee, with this woman. (“She could hardly bear to have women friends, in fact, for all the constant sharing they required.”) Cassy is even less likable: When the topic of Doctors Without Borders comes up over dinner, she rather nastily calls them “those goody-two-shoes volunteers.”Some of the other characters have bouts of atrocious behavior as well, but the novel remains buoyant. Mr. Galanes’s nuanced but lightly deployed psychological insight makes us root for, not against, these fearful, self-castigating people. Some of them walk through life hearing their mothers’ voices in their heads, calling them out for their failures and shortcomings. Emma hears her father’s voice — but even its indictments of her aren’t as harsh as her own.Emma let her mind wander over a cavalcade of thieveries, the virtual encyclopedia of all her wrongdoings. She kept a mental list at the ready — always had, the better to lacerate herself. She toted crimes from her childhood and from two minutes before, the little maneuverings and big power plays, the ones she’d gotten away with, scot-free, she’d thought, and the ones she’d paid the price for too.In other hands, a novel about a fictionalized Martha Stewart would be an occasion for a hatchet job. But Mr. Galanes, in this unlikely act of empathetic imagining, has created a heroine not only capable of but also deserving of kindness.

Mostly Martha: Philip Galanes’s ‘Emma’s Table’

Mostly Martha: Philip Galanes’s ‘Emma’s Table’

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