“A Nearly Perfect Job”

All the Beauty in the World: the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

by Patrick Bringley

Simon and Schuster, 2023 (paperback 2024)

reviewed by Seana Graham

Say what you will about reading groups; they can be the gateway to a book that you never would have come across otherwise. Although this may not be strictly true for this book, which was a New York Times bestseller, I still managed never to have heard of it. And that would have been my loss.

Patrick Bringley chronicles ten years of his life as a security guard at the New York Met, a job he applies for after the untimely death of his brother. This is a definite veering off course for him, as, after college, he had managed to find himself a position at The New Yorker and seemed to be riding high. But his brother’s illness and death made him reevaluate things, and I found his description of his time at this prestigious job interesting:

It took me almost three years to grasp an unwelcome paradox. If I were working at a less “impressive” job, I would be scribbling my thoughts down in obscurity, free to take big swings at whatever topic inspired me. Here in the big leagues, however, my thoughts were curiously small. I spent my time trying to write one-paragraph book reviews in the “Briefly Noted” section, using a voice that was not my own, claiming authority I hadn’t earned, and expressing opinions I wasn’t sure I really held.

When Bringley’s brother Tom dies as a young man after a struggle with cancer, Patrick realizes that he is no longer interested in “scrapping and scraping and muscling my way forward through the world.” A visit with his mother to an art museum makes him wonder if the life of a security guard might provide some solace, and, not long after, he finds himself working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The book is a seamless interweaving of the history of the Met and Bringley’s time as a guard, his life outside the museum, and a thoughtful contemplation of a large number of works of art he encountered there. At the end of the volume, there is a list of all the artworks he talks about, with a way to easily access them via the Met’s website.

Even if it had nothing else to offer, the book would be invaluable for bringing to life the people we often view as if they were automatons in all these rooms full of art. Several book group members said they thought they might venture to strike up a conversation with the guards they encountered on their next museum visit. After all, who else has contemplated the pieces on view longer than they have?

Even nine or ten years in, Bringley continues to “find pleasure standing on post. It remains a nearly perfect job, though maybe perfection is no longer what I need. I used to feel the main business of my life was performed inside these galleries, and  I relished the meditative stillness.” But now, with two small children, he finds his “thoughts flying outside the museum’s walls.” As he describes his last day, I found myself surprisingly moved. He will be able to visit the Met again, of course, but he will not have the same relation to it, or to the guards he’s worked with.

At the book group, I read aloud one of the few quotations that Bringley adds to the book, this one from Anton Kerssemaker, an artist friend of van Gogh’s. He had brought van Gogh to the Rijksmuseum and left him sitting before Rembrandt’s “The Jewish Bride.”

When I came back after a pretty long while and asked him whether we should not get a move on, he gave me a surprised look and said, “Would you believe it—and I honestly mean what I say—I would give ten years of my life if I could go on sitting here in front of this picture for a fortnight, with only a crust of dry bread for food?” At last he got up. “Well, never mind,” he said. “We can’t stay here forever, can we?

Seana Graham is the book review editor at Escape Into Life. She has also reviewed for the biography website Simply Charly. She attempts to keep up with her various blogs, including Confessions of Ignorance, where she tries to learn a little bit more about the many things she does not know. She has published stories in a variety of literary journals. The recent anthology Annihilation Radiation  from Storgy Press, includes one of them. Santa Cruz Noir, a title from Akashic Press, features a story of hers about the city in which she currently resides. 

Get All the Beauty in the World at Simon and Schuster

Find the art Patrick mentions in the book at this website

Patrick Bringley interview on YouTube

Patrick Bringley on NPR (with transcript)