Keynote
A new high point for a master novelist, an emotionally charged reckoning with art, marriage, and the past
Book Title
So Much Blue
Subtitle
A Novel
Cover Image
- “Everett is an author who started his career off strong and just keeps getting better. [So Much Blue is] a generous, thrilling book by a man who might well be America’s most under-recognized literary master.”—NPR.org
Body
Kevin Pace is working on a painting that he won’t allow anyone to see: not his children, not his best friend Richard, not even his wife, Linda. The painting is a canvas of twelve feet by twenty-one feet (and three inches) that is covered entirely in shades of blue. It may be his masterpiece or it may not; he doesn’t know or more accurately doesn’t care.
What Kevin does care about are the events of the past. Ten years ago he had an affair with a young watercolorist in Paris. Kevin relates this event with a dispassionate air, even a bit of puzzlement. It’s not clear to him why he had the affair, but he can’t let it go. In the more distant past of the late seventies, Kevin and Richard traveled to El Salvador on the verge of war to retrieve Richard’s drug-dealing brother, who had gone missing without explanation. As the events of the past intersect with the present, Kevin struggles to justify the sacrifices he’s made for his art and the secrets he’s kept from his wife.
So Much Blue features Percival Everett at his best, and his deadpan humor and insightful commentary about the artistic life culminate in a brilliantly readable new novel.
What Kevin does care about are the events of the past. Ten years ago he had an affair with a young watercolorist in Paris. Kevin relates this event with a dispassionate air, even a bit of puzzlement. It’s not clear to him why he had the affair, but he can’t let it go. In the more distant past of the late seventies, Kevin and Richard traveled to El Salvador on the verge of war to retrieve Richard’s drug-dealing brother, who had gone missing without explanation. As the events of the past intersect with the present, Kevin struggles to justify the sacrifices he’s made for his art and the secrets he’s kept from his wife.
So Much Blue features Percival Everett at his best, and his deadpan humor and insightful commentary about the artistic life culminate in a brilliantly readable new novel.
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About the Author
Credit: Michael Avedon
Praise
- “So Much Blue is a comparatively accessible work yet still displays [Percival Everett’s] narrative prowess, erudition and sense of enigma. It is, in short, an ideal place to start with this great but neglected novelist.’”—The Wall Street Journal
- “Each individual strand of So Much Blue has a page-turning urgency of its own—but taken together they add up to a masterpiece.”—The Boston Globe
- “Captivating and pleasurable . . . So Much Blue is a ‘coming of middle-age’ story worth gazing into.”—Los Angeles Times
- “Tightly wound and slow-burning. . . . Americans dabbling in politics, drugs, bloodsport south of the border; an American indulging in faithless love in Paris; class posturing among Americans in Rhode Island — Everett has blended these disparate strands of an imagined life into a quietly beguiling novel. That he’s constructed it on an edifice of clichés, sanded down and transformed into combustive elements, is a sign of his mastery of the form.”—New York Magazine
