The hook: During a pandemic, protagonist Jay is a gig economy zero-hours driver. He delivers groceries to a posh house in its own estate in the countryside. At the door is Alice, an old girlfriend, who left him for his best friend, with whom she is still living. Jay is sick and collapses, so Alice hides him in a barn on the land until he gets well.As Jay recovers, he reminisces in an extended flashback and we learn about how he studied art in London and became a performance artist and how he met, loved, lived with and lost Alice to Rob, his friend, a fellow student who is now a successful artist.
As the book progresses, we start to discover more of Jay's story and exactly why he is no longer making art. And the pressures of both the pandemic and the art world combine to bring things to a frightening climax.
It's an fascinating exploration of a subculture that spans everything from starving in squats to multi-millionaire collectors. There is a huge amount of verisimilitude in the descriptions of the drug-fuelled lifestyle associated with that world. Sometimes, the narrative seems a little plot heavy, although it doesn't seem to actually go anywhere (which is perfectly consonant with the theme). There are intimate portrayals of the personalities within it, vulnerable and insecure like the rest of us, but obsessed by the idea that making marks on a piece of canvas (or videoing a performance, or building a sculpture, or ...) is perhaps more important than anything else.
The narrator-protagonist is quite an impressive person for a casual worker in the gig economy. Not only is he a legend on the internet (and totally unaware of the fact, rather like the eponymous hero of Vernon Subutex 1) but he is an art-school graduate qualified to crew and navigate ships whose interior monologue is full of learned references, not just concepts with art (which suffuse the book):
- The ship of Theseus: a concept in classical philosophy (p 25)
- The (un)examined life: a concept from Socrates (p 30)
- The science of metabolism (p 33)
- Marlowe's Faust (p 123)
Blue Ruin is a painting of a "giant white cruise ship disgorging passengers into a semi-submerged city ... In the foreground, crowded into the frame, were the tourists, horrific semi-human figures, all wearing orange life vests." (p 230)
The pandemic context, the feeling that we are living in a dystopia, perhaps nearing an apocalyptic end of times, and the theme of rootlessness and anonymity in a world (of art) where reputation is crucial, are the primary colours in this bleak portrait of the pointlessness of life.
Selected quotes: (page numbers refer to the Simon & Schuster 2024 edition)
"If people viewed me in a certain way because I was cleaning a toilet or picking up trash, that was on them, not me." (p 4)
"My beard is turning white and my eyes are sinking into their sockets like pebbles slowly dropping down a well. ... if I catch sight of myself in a mirror, on a good day I'm reminded of a piece of driftwood. Knotted, ground down by sand and water." (p 5)
"It's a fiction we seem to demand, that a person be substantially the same throughout their lives - human ships of Theseus, each part replaced, but in some essential way unchanging. We are less continuous than we pretend. There are jumps, punctuations, sudden reorganizations of selfhood." (p 25)
"Surrounded by students signaling distressed bohemia, all patches and thrift store irony." (p 29)
"Maybe she could live the unexamined life. Mine presented itself as an endless decision tree, a constant steeplechase of exhausting and difficult choices." (p 30)
"Later I would discover Rob's sponge-like quality, his ability to metabolise culture, efficiently and rapidly, to break down its sugars and use them to grow." (p 33)
"As I stepped inside, my feet sank into the deep-pile carpet of the vestibule and something metaphysical closed all around me, a feeling that my reality had just forked and the life in which I hadn't crossed that threshold was now utterly irretrievable." (p 97)
"If technique or craft wasn't what made someone a good artist, what did? The conventional answer was that a good artist was someone who had good ideas." (p 106)
"We smoked weed from the moment we woke up in the morning, moving about our pale green undersea world like unquiet ghosts. Occasionally the real world would intrude, but usually it felt as if we'd slipped through the cracks, the difference between inner and outer space collapsing until reality was purely a function of what we'd ingested that day. At first it seemed exciting, as if we'd found an illicit truth, a doorway in to a place that was inaccessible to normal people, but gradually the returns diminished, and instead of beauty and wonder, our artificial paradise began to feel like a trap." (p109)
"I looked at the face that had launched a thousand of my twenty-something ships." (p 123)
"It was as if I'd come upon a portal, a point where the world was touched by some other nearby reality. The birch glade had been sliced up like a vertical louvre, the filigree of branches and dappled light superimposed on another near-identical version of itself, segements of splinters of a second forest transposed or rhymed with the first, or - that was it - reflected." (p 130)
"I've worked alongside men for weeks, sometimes months, withouyt finding out a single piece of personal information, or being asked one question about myself." (p 145)
"The work of all artists - was an alibi for the desire to put a frame around a certain part of life, to declare that inside the frame was art, and outside was not." (p 161)
"Only in the system we have, where everyone is expected to be an entrepreneur of the self, is anonymity a kind of death." (p 180)
"But I've been travelling for years. ... going somewhere isn't the point. The point is finding somewhere to stay." (p 213)
July 2025; 257 pages
Published in the USA by Knopf and in the UK by Simon & Schuster, 2024
The Guardian review suggested that both characters and plots were stereotypes.
Other books about art and artists reviewed on this blog:
- Literary fiction:
- My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
- The Gift of Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
- The Masterpiece by Emile Zola
- The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
- Murder mysteries
- The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte: set in the world of art restoration.
- The Brutal Art by Jesse Kellerman: set in the world of New York art galleries.
And, unreviewed here but utterly brilliant in my eyes, is my own novel with an painting protagonist: Bally and Bro which only costs £1.99 on kindle.
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