Metropolitan Stories

I can tell that the author loves the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its objects dearly, but this book left me cold.

It is a series of interconnected short stories set in the Met in the late 1990s (there is a mention in one story that 9/11 hasn't happened yet but will soon). Some bits were charming and funny, but the magical realism elements were uneven and the work environment sounded miserable. All of the male staff characters were annoying, which may be true to life but wasn't fun to read. The magical realism elements involved the art pieces being alive, which worked sometimes (a story from the point of view of a chair in the collection, the story about the Adam statue falling) and didn't work other times (the ghost story was ridiculous, the story with the muses, how unclear the art movement rules seemed to be, the sheer whiteness behind the idea that all of the art “wants” to be there despite some of it being taken from other countries...).