By: Sarah Wallace
Seth Panitch has spent decades telling stories in many forms, from Shakespearean performance and directing to filmmaking and playwriting. After receiving his MFA from the University of Washington’s Professional Actors Training Program, he built a wide-ranging career at Shakespeare festivals across the country, including Colorado, Utah, Texas, Seattle, and Pasadena. In 2005, he joined the University of Alabama as a Professor of Theatre and head of the MFA Acting Program. In 2008, he became the first U.S. director to collaborate with the Cuban National Office of Scenic Arts when he directed The Merchant of Venice in Havana, Cuba. He has also written, directed, and starred in two feature films, Service to Man and The Coming, while his plays have enjoyed successful Off-Broadway productions. Now, with his novel Antique, Panitch turns his attention to a story about reinvention, resilience, and the question that haunts so many people when life falls apart: What am I worth?
That question sits at the very center of the story. The novel follows Grace Schaffer, a former star appraiser on an Antiques Roadshow-style television show who suddenly finds herself stripped of the life she thought defined her. Her husband’s affair destroys her marriage. Her career collapses. Her father, a giant in the art history world, has died. The identity Grace spent years building is gone, and she is left facing not only public humiliation but a deeply private kind of uncertainty.
Panitch captures that emotional premise succinctly. “If you’ve ever seen Antiques Roadshow before, you know that people bring these incredible, cherished heirlooms to the appraisers to ask how much they’re worth, but if you look closer, you realize they’re asking, ‘What am I worth?’” he says. “Grace Schaffer has lost the answer to that question.”
That line reveals why the novel resonates beyond its unusual setting. On one level, it is about appraisals, auctions, and beautiful old objects. On another, it is about the fragile ways people measure themselves. So much of modern life encourages external valuation, including career status, relationship status, acclaim, money, and relevance. Grace has lost all of those markers, and in the wake of that loss, she has to decide whether she can rebuild a sense of worth from the inside out.
Her unexpected opportunity comes through a humbler venue: a much smaller Antique Roadshow, where she begins again. There, Grace encounters a tarnished necklace and makes a seemingly reckless choice, inflating its value because of what it means emotionally to the mother and daughter who own it. But the necklace appears to hold a strange power. Once Grace begins assigning prices based on emotional value rather than strict market logic, those values come true at auction. What follows is both magical and deeply human, as Grace is pulled back into the art world and into a search that may redeem her career, or consume her.
What makes the novel especially compelling is the way Panitch connects Grace’s external comeback to an internal reckoning. This is not just a story about reentering a profession. It is a story about learning to see value differently. In Grace’s world, the worth of an object is never only financial. It carries memory, family, longing, and grief. That same principle gradually turns back on Grace herself. If objects can mean more than the market says they should, perhaps people can too.
Panitch has said the novel grew out of a pandemic-era moment while watching a rerun of Antiques Roadshow. A man brought in an old piece of fabric he assumed was worth very little and learned it was, in fact, an extraordinarily valuable Navajo Ute Chief’s blanket. The man wept, repeating that his grandmother and mother “were just poor farmers.” Panitch recalls, “It was as if the world had told him that his family was worth that much.” At once moved and troubled by the moment, he realized how often people rely on outside authorities to affirm their value. “I also thought, how sad it was, that we need someone else to give us that value, that we can’t find it within ourselves. In that, Antique was born.”
That idea gives the novel its emotional force. Grace’s journey is dramatic and enchanted, but its heart is familiar. Many readers will recognize the fear of becoming irrelevant, the pain of being left behind, or the disorientation that follows a major life change. Panitch is particularly interested in what happens when people are made to feel discarded. The title itself points to that tension. He opens the book with the dual definition of “antique” as something rare and valuable, but also, pejoratively, something washed up or out of fashion. That contradiction becomes a lens through which the novel examines age, experience, and cultural ideas about usefulness.
Yet the novel is not bleak. It is ultimately a story of second chances. Grace may begin the story broken, but she is not finished. Panitch clearly believes that reinvention remains possible, even after loss. In discussing his own creative path, he notes that writing novels was in some ways a return to his earliest dream, delayed but not abandoned. That spirit of return and rediscovery runs throughout the book.
Panitch hopes readers come away encouraged by that possibility. “I hope they can take away a little of my experience in writing the book: that there are hidden parts of themselves that deserve to be uncovered, dusted off, and celebrated,” he says. “That there is magic within us—if we dare to use it.”
That may be the deepest appeal of Antique. Beneath the auction drama, the art-world intrigue, and the shimmer of magical realism, it offers something readers are always searching for: hope that life can be rebuilt, that value can be reclaimed, and that even after heartbreak, something precious remains. Grace Schaffer’s journey asks what survives when the old labels fall away. Seth Panitch’s answer is both tender and inspiring: perhaps the truest worth was there all along.
To get more information about Antique, you can visit Antique: A Novel: Panitch, Seth: 9781538772942: Amazon.com: Books
