The Prize

Poet and memoirist Jill Bialosky published her first novel, The Prize, in 2015. Tracking a year in the life of a New York art dealer whose self-deluding idealism clashes with the realities of his industry, the novel is an examination of how art intersects with commerce, the ebb and flow of married life, and the conflict between what is artistic and moral values. Throughout, the reader also experiences the subtle betrayal of an unreliable narrator – although the protagonist isn’t actually telling the story in the first person, the fact that we are always meant to so closely identify with him and his concerns makes it hard at first to spot how his “good-guy image is betrayed by his inconsistencies and even hypocrisy.”

Forty-two-year-old Edward Darby, on the face of it, has everything life could possibly offer. His life is compartmentalized into two zones. At home in Connecticut, he has a cozy marriage to Holly, with whom he has a teenage daughter. At work in Tribeca, he is a partner in a renowned art gallery, where he has built a career out of helping promote artists who are experimenting and changing, creating art “that has the power to suggest that the most ordinary spaces of human life could be made special.”

However, underneath this surface, Edward is floundering, caught ever more surely in a mid-life crisis. Edward at first became an art dealer under the influence of his late father, Harry, a Romantics scholar who taught him that “art should transport the seer from the ordinary to the sublime,” and whose idealism about the purity of beautiful art eventually turned into an obsession. Harry died when Edward was still in college, and now, trying to uphold his father’s values makes Edward feel like the one disinterested purist in an art world filled with opportunists, cynics, and money-hungry boors. Edward often consoles himself by comparing his own good, benevolent motives to what he perceives as the disingenuous work of other art dealers like gallery owner Alex Savan – a man who does exactly the same job as Edward, moves in exactly the same circles, and vies for exactly the same artists, yet, nevertheless, is somehow seen by Edward as a different breed of man altogether. To cement this idea that he stands apart, Edward finds himself driven to search for deeper meaning in his work, haunted by his father’s devotion to poetry while also horrified by his memories of an isolated Harry slowly losing his connection to everyone around him.



Edward’s big break comes when his gallery starts representing the brilliant but emotionally needy artist Agnes Murray who has forged her reputation with a series of images from the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. The beautiful, emaciated Agnes is married to her former professor, the much older art world star Nate Fisher. He is vulgar and unpleasant, but he has nurtured Agnes’s career and has coddled her neuroses.

The more Edward is sucked into the world of Nate and Agness, the more his dedication to his ideals is tested. Agnes does seem in need of protection, which Nate and now Edward both provide. At the same time, it is clear that sheltering her from the outside world also serves to keep her from being poached by other galleries – which Edward makes sure to do while telling Agnes that he is simply keeping her away from people who don’t have her best interests at heart. While this is happening, we see the shifting power dynamics in Nate and Agnes’s marriage, as they are in constant competition with each other over their standing in the art world. Later, Edward sees Nate with another woman and realizes that he is a narcissist who simply uses the women around him for his own ends.

Enmeshed in this insular, tiny world where the stakes seem very high but are known to only a few people, Edward realizes that by keeping Holly and his home away from his work life, what he has really done is drive a wedge into his marriage. Nevertheless, this isn’t the only thing that is keeping Holly somewhat at arm’s length. Edward has kept a series of secrets from her as well. For one thing, his father, Harry, actually committed suicide by overdosing on Lithium after learning that another scholar had taken credit for much of his work. For another thing, Holly isn’t Edward’s first wife – Edward was previously married to Tess, his college sweetheart, who died in a horrible car accident.



In the meantime, though, Edward reconnects with a sculptor whom he used to represent – Julia Rosenthal. Julia is married to Roy, an architect, but their marriage has become cold and distant ever since she delivered a stillborn child. Julia’s work reconnects Edward with his appreciation for beauty and form – and the two embark on an affair. The relationship with Julia makes Edward consider his past, rethinking the ways he has kept Holly from many parts of his life. Why hasn’t he shared these parts of himself with her? He has no idea and decides to go to therapy in order to get to know himself better. Therapy gives him the inner resources to finally deal with the man who ruined his father’s life and drove him to suicide – a productive and cathartic confrontation.

The last part of the novel tackles the “prize” of the title – the prestigious Tanning Prize. Surprising everyone, the prize’s winner isn’t Agnes, but a new artist – April. The novel ends on a hopeful note that her work may reinvigorate the world Edward has come to see with a gimlet eye.