Museum

This novel is both a love story and the history of the Skane family's Museum of Living Art, as it changes from a small private museum into a large public institution, what Emerson called "the lengthened shadow of one man." That man, that shadow, the museum's founder, permeates the novel. Though long dead, his ideas, his wishes, his dreams struggle to stay alive in the consciousness of his son who sits on the museum's board. The son's relationship to his sister and other trustees is deeply experienced within the context of seemingly cold, businesslike board meetings and, outside the boardroom, in equally intense relationships with two women, a painter and an art historian, as he, on his own behalf as well as his father's, resists the institutionalization of dreams.