Moral dilemmas, offbeat characters and seriously raunchy sex scenes

Like the courts, and how victims of sexual abuse are treated. Or the beauty industry, and where body image intersects with commerce, or the private school system, and who decides who gets to go where.

Or, in her latest book, The Work, the machinations of the art world.

In this, her first novel, Lee takes a scalpel to the world of art, both old and new, and neatly carves out all the illusions of romance about those who deal in it. It is a rough business, driven and made by money, and power, and the fashion of the day.

It's also defined by tradition, convention, rules forged long ago in different times that still endure even as the world ticks on.

But The Work isn't a treatise, or a manifesto, but rather a smart and sexy romance between two people who love art and move among artists, but who aren't themselves artists.

"A book takes so long - this one took five years. Whatever the book is about really has to be driven by something I'm grappling with, like a question or an issue," Lee says, a week out from The Work's release on an unsuspecting world.

"And for this one, it was definitely how money affects love and how money affects art."

Lee spent several weeks in New York, in early 2019, observing the art world. She visited museums and independent galleries, took in the different approaches of dealers and artists, marvelled at the money. But it was the Armory Art Show, New York's all-important yearly art fair, that really brought home how nuts it all was.

"I just saw how bonkers the scene was, and I was like, I've got to set a novel here, because there was too much high-value people-watching and eavesdropping. I wanted that to be one of the two backdrops."

The New York backdrop features ambitious Lally, who owns an eponymous gallery to which she has more or less devoted her waking existence, to the detriment of any kind of love life.

Over in Sydney, Pat is a country boy from Queensland desperate to establish himself in the antiquities scene.

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The two meet at the Armory Show in Manhattan, and the attraction is instant. The book follows the two of them, back and forth and together, as they grapple with their own morphing relationships with ambition, love, money and art. Can either of them have it all? Can they even have each other? It's a romp and a half, peppered with moral dilemmas, outlandish but believable characters and some seriously raunchy sex scenes.

Lee was, she says, adamant that her characters stood for a kind of interrogation of the kind of sexual dynamics we've grown used to.

"It was just really important to me that the man character was in his late 20s and the woman was in her early 30s, because I feel like for the last decade, as a reader, that I have just been reading so much bad sex," she says. "I wanted to explore what a relationship looks like, when even a slight age difference is in the opposite direction to what is so normal in our culture, more broadly."

Along the way, Lee also poses some twisty questions about the ethics of the art world. Is she worried that some might, well, take it the wrong way?

"The thing about any creative industry is that the people who work in the industry have such unique approaches to their work, even for the people who are artist-adjacent," she says. "I really wanted to set a book in a creative scene where the protagonists weren't themselves artists. I'm very interested in all of these other jobs, in all of these cogs and parts - people who affect the way the sausage gets made.

"And the thing is, if you run your own small independent gallery, different gallerists have very different approaches to how they find artists, how they manage those artists."

Lally faces a moral quandary when she decides to platform a controversial artist who will nevertheless make money for her. In return, she tells herself, she will be able to afford to program lesser-known artists. Plus, she's nearly finished paying off her fancy apartment.

In the world of antiquities, meanwhile, Pat has gone way out there in convincing an older woman to let him help her sell her rich ex-husband's stash of collectables. All he really wants is a nicer home and a dog. Or does he want more?

"It's about money - everything is affected by and then in turn affects capital," Lee says. "And I don't think we gain anything by trying to minimise or ignore that. We have to have the courage to look that squarely in the face, both for ourselves and our culture."

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