by Jane Boon
2024 (Regan Arts)
Erika Grieg is walking through her upscale gallery in Chelsea, surrounded by a series of large fetishistic paintings. She is placing tiny red dots next to the ones that have already been sold, in anticipation of the official opening later that night. Sales have not been as strong this year, and the typically cool and collected Erika is growing a bit nervous. She´s been trying to stay abreast of the market, but keeps getting conflicting information. Should she be scared? Will she and her wealthy clients be dramatically affected? It is June 2008 in New York City, and unbeknownst to her and all of the other characters in Bold Strokes, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers is still a few months away. In this fiction, as in our real world, things will get worse before they get better.
Jane Boon describes her latest book as "social satire disguised as smut;" it´s a succinct summation of what readers can expect in this novel. In addition to being a gallery owner, Erika is also a professional dominatrix; her two worlds cater to a similar clientele of rich men, and sometimes the clients who purchase one of her paintings are the same ones who schedule a private session in her state of the art dungeon below. In Boon´s telling, these two worlds share numerous parallels, making them two sides of the same coin within Bold Strokes´carefully crafted & heavily-researched narrative. Just like money and art, commerce and arousal are linked, and Erika´s kink seems to have less to do with actual sex than it does with excessive capitalism. More than a partner, Erika craves financial stability and freedom; she wants money, and a lot of it. Placing those tiny red dots next to the paintings that she helped to sell? That´s what really gets her moist.
Readers who enjoyed her 2020 debut Edge Play will recognize some familiar themes in Boon`s latest. In both, she focuses on a particular slice of the elite, predominantly uber-wealthy men on both sides of the Atlantic who work tirelessly to manage or accumulate impossibly large sums of money. If or when they are able to carve out momentary relief from their labors, they frequently seek to surrender their agency and succumb to the careful control of Erika, who spanks or binds or deprives them of their senses and movement during their various consensual scenes together. In Bold Strokes, trading on Wall Street and being inside an elite private dungeon are part of the same continuum, marking two points along a single pole. Over the course of the story, Boon notes numerous connections between those roles we assume in public and those we assume in the bedroom or in the dungeon. Which of these is "more real" than the other? Do we not assume roles in all of them, and aren´t money and sex all about power? As her novel unfolds, Boon explores these questions further, particularly power´s malleability, as well as its dependency on context and consent. Plus, because she locates her story on the eve of a global financial crisis, we see how truly fragile this power is--in banking, in art, in kink.
Right from the opening scene, Boon establishes some of these connections through action and dialogue. Shortly before the gallery officially opens to celebrate these paintings, we observe Erika is in a private room with Cassidy. She mentors the young artist on how to dress and who to talk to, as well as shares why so many of the wealthy enjoy making "sacrifices on the altar of commerce." As the two begin working the crowd, Erika crosses paths with Edouard, one of her distinctly wealthy clients who also happens to be one of her most devoted submissives. Whatever pleasure or reassurance she experiences from his suave and soothing presence is quickly disrupted, however, by her discovery that her father was at the gallery earlier. Erika has a complicated past, one that she has attempted to outrun for years, but now is catching up with her. How will it change her, both personally and in both of her businesses
The next dozen chapters are some of my favorites in Bold Strokes; Boon goes back in time, dramatizing key moments in Erika´s life over the previous 20 years that led to the successful gallerist & dominatrix today. We visit her while an undergraduate of art history at Harvard, dipping her toes into the local BDSM scene, and clumsily learning about consent during some impact play at a club. We go back further to the moment when, as a young girl in middle-school, the FBI came to her door with an arrest warrant for her father, who had been involved in an elaborate scheme to swindle his clients from their investmenets. Later, during her senior year in high school, Erika is hired by Mr. Kovac to serve as an assistant for his modest art studio. All of these and more of the episodes are believable and engaging, and we can see how they will contribute to the character and thinking of the adult Erika in the later sections of the novel.
As we return to 2008, we learn more about her father´s current scheme, and why Erika chooses to stay far away from what looks like a dangerous enterprise that could compromise her livelihood. We follow her for an extended "strategic retreat" in Switzerland with Edouard, where she stays as his gust and live-in dominatrix but whose bond steadily grows into something far more nuanced and complex. A number of chapters here focus on engaging conversations between the two of them over elaborate dinners--about money, the future, about ways Erika could leave being a dominatrix behind entirely--as well as descriptive scenes of Edourad´s fantasies coming to life in his playroom.
While certainly an erotic novel on some level, Bold Strokes is much more expansive in its narrative ambitions. Boon is eager to tease out the connections between these sexual kinks and our larger world, particularly in the worlds of art and finance; she is curious about the desires that drive men like Edouard to invest all day, and why women like Erika choose to wear leather corsets to bind clients at night. Both seek a specific sort of freedom, an independence from the limitations or expectations of their complicated pasts. The book reads as easily as a thriller, stimulates the mind with its dialogue surrounding Damien Hirst and the downtown New York art world, and titillates with its intelligent and nuanced episodes around BDSM. Bold Strokes is an excellent new novel from Jane Boon, and not just for the plutosexuals out there who might find themselves identifying with Erika´s wants and needs.
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