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Allan Hepburn. Enchanted Objects: Visual Art in Contemporary Fiction. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2010. x + 278 pp.
Allan Hepburn's Enchanted Objects contemplates the centrality of art objects-paintings, statues, books, porcelain, vases, excavated ru- ins-in contemporary fiction. Considering how these objects circulate in novels of the past forty years, Hepburn uses literature as a leaping- off point to theorize aesthetic value in culture writ-large. His descrip- tion of his primary sources aptly summarizes his own monograph: like the novels Hepburn analyzes, Enchanted Objects "speculate[s] on what an artwork is and does," as well as "historicize[s] value and critique[s] museum culture" (10-11). Organized by topic (details, ornamentation, fragility, ugliness), Hepburn's meditation integrates discussions of museums and objects (The Museum of Jurassic Technol- ogy, The Portland Vase, Peter the Great's collection of pulled teeth) into its expansive study of recent fiction and several centuries of theory. As such a capacious archive intimates, Enchanted Objects reflects Hepburn's wide-ranging interest in contemporary visual art, museum culture, and determinations of aesthetic value.
Hepburn's study moves fluidly between the novels he analyzes and the questions of aesthetic and economic value dramatized by the narratives, and it is these questions of non-fictive cultural investment that are ultimately Hepburn's major concern. In his second chapter, for example, Hepburn analyzes the function of detail in recent novels that feature the paintings of seventeenth-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, most notably Tracy Chevalier's Girl With a Pearl Earring (1999). Developing a poetics of detail that focuses on literature but considers art objects more broadly, Hepburn suggests that detail's role in the narrative and style of these specific works of fiction has its corollaries in painting and other aesthetic forms. In the particular case of these Vermeer novels,...