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.Įmma is the central character of Mr. 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. 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.

Post-incarceration, Emma is increasingly aware that her ruthless, charred-earth method of doing things is not exactly working out for her anymore. “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. 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. 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. 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. 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. In her arms is a pink-collared lapdog, all pampered perfection. Clad in a tailored scarlet coat, she wears outsize pearls at her throat and on her earlobes, a glittering rock on her right hand. 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.

Emma's Table by Philip Galanes