The Portrait of a Mirror

A Novel

By: A. Natasha Joukovsky

Narrated by: Eva Kaminsky

Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins

Publisher's summary

Vulture.com Pick

Brit + Co Pick

Literary Hub Pick

A stunning reinvention of the myth of Narcissus as a modern novel of manners, about two young, well-heeled couples whose parallel lives intertwine over the course of a summer, by a sharp new voice in fiction

Wes and Diana are the kind of privileged, well-educated, self-involved New Yorkers you may not want to like but can’t help wanting to like you. With his boyish good looks, blue-blood pedigree, and the recent tidy valuation of his tech start-up, Wes would have made any woman weak in the knees - any woman, that is, except perhaps his wife. Brilliant to the point of cunning, Diana possesses her own arsenal of charms, handily deployed against Wes in their constant wars of will and rhetorical sparring.

Vivien and Dale live in Philadelphia, but with ties to the same prep schools and management consulting firms as Wes and Diana, they’re of the same ilk. With a wedding date on the horizon and carefully curated life of coupledom, Vivien and Dale make a picture-perfect pair on Instagram. But when Vivien becomes a visiting curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art just as Diana is starting a new consulting project in Philadelphia, the two couples’ lives cross and tangle. It’s the summer of 2015, and they’re all enraptured by one another and too engulfed in desire to know what they want - despite knowing just how to act.

In this wickedly fun debut, A. Natasha Joukovsky crafts an absorbing portrait of modern romance, rousing real sympathy for these flawed characters even as she skewers them. Shrewdly observed, whip-smart, and shot through with wit and good humor, The Portrait of a Mirror is a piercing exploration of narcissism, desire, self-delusion, and the great mythology of love.

©2021 A. Natasha Joukovsky. Published in 2021 by the Overlook Press, an imprint of ABRAMS, New York. All rights reserved (P)2021 Blackstone Publishing

Too good

Emily Giffin meets Edith Wharton meets an exhibition at the Met. Beautifully woven, an artistic commentary on modern culture, shocks you with its irreverence and simultaneously how perfectly it captures the trapped ennui of the uptown upper class. A game changer and the new bar for modern romance.

Devoured this book!

So happy I downloaded this on a whim - I finished it within a week! I really enjoyed the art references and the setting, sort of felt like I was learning along side the fictional audience. Like the meals in the book, this was an indulgent and over the top listen.

Only problem was that some of the emails, texts, screenshots in the book were difficult to follow so I took a star from performance. But I really liked the narrator - I could actually tell a difference in voice between ALL the characters.

Snarky narration

Whether you would find something to like about these entitled millennials in a sort of Edith Wharton-like social commentary is destroyed by the snarky narration. There are a lot of clever, erudite references to Ovid and play on the Narcissus myth, but like that story, the writer is too in love with her own words. A skip.