A Nearly Perfect Copy

Amend (Things That Pass for Love) presents a tangled tale of two unrelated characters under grave emotional duress whose actions affect each other indelibly, though they remain strangers for the duration of the novel. The writing in the novel's first half is somewhat cumbersome and ponderous, with much unnecessary and distracting detail. The setting is the complicated and ever-changing art world of New York and Paris, and although Amend portrays easy familiarity with this context, some readers may find their interest wavering. The protagonists are the troubled Elm Howells, who works at a prestigious Manhattan auction house, and the marginal but ambitious French artist Gabriel Connois, but other characters are introduced abruptly and developed rather unevenly without having fully captivated the reader's interest.