Review by New York Times Review
PERCIVAL EVERETT might have called his latest novel "Mood Indigo," after the famous Duke Ellington composition, or even "All Blues," after the composition by Miles Davis, but that might have given too much away - been a bit too obvious about the connection between color and creativity. Everett is one of the more accomplished and prolific novelists on the scene over the last three decades. Satirical, wildly comic metafictions like "A History of the African-American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond" (2004), "I Am Not Sidney Poitier" (2009) and "Erasure" (2001) - novels for which he is best known - show not only Everett's fertile imagination but also his skillful ability to blend influences as disparate as John Dos Passos, Isimmel Reed and Robert Coover. "So Much Blue" is a less exuberant book, telling the story of Kevin Pace, a 56-year-old painter working in a barn in Martha's Vineyard, on an enormous canvas "12 feet high and 21 feet and three inches across" that he will permit no one, not even his wife, Linda, or his best friend, Richard, to see: "The painting was mine, only mine, I wanted it to be only mine, to mean for me and for me alone." He began the painting nine years before, when his elder child was 7 and his younger was 3, after he had just returned from Paris, concluding a brief but passionate affair with Victoire, a watercolorist half his age, which he concealed from his wife. The new canvas, as it turns out, is dominated by the color blue, with which Kevin is not comfortable and which he hardly ever used. "I could never control it," he says. "Regardless that blue was so likable, a color that so many loved or liked - no one hated blue - I could not use it." He adds, "I sometimes hated blue." (According to the medieval historian Michel Pastoureau, blue polls as the favorite color in the Western world and has done so since the 18th century.) An earlier small painting, "Fledgling Blue," became "the seminal image of my large private painting." The reader never learns what this or any other of Kevin's paintings really is - that is, what any of them look like. The novel contains three narrative threads: Kevin's affair with Victoire in Paris; his time at home in New England, at "the edge of the country or the edge of town," as he works on his giant blue canvas and his ill-tempered 16-year-old daughter reveals to him that she is pregnant; and, finally, his story of accompanying his friend Richard to El Salvador in 1979, when the country was on the brink of civil war, in search of Richard's older brother, Tad, who "had been in and out of detention, prison, abusive relationships, and an assortment of drug rehab programs" and had not been heard from in seven months. It is in this way that "So Much Blue" is built around a series or, one might say, a system of secrets that Kevin keeps from Linda: his affair with Victoire, his daughter's pregnancy (his discretion at the insistence of his daughter) and what happened to him when he went to El Salvador. This is all in addition to keeping the giant canvas secret from Linda as well. It might be said that Everett's novel suggests that marriage is built on closely guarded secrets - which is not quite the same thing as saying it is built on lies or deception, but rather, in a D. H. Lawrence kind of way, it suggests that marriage makes a certain contradictory impulse plain and even necessary: Marriage is about trying to sustain one's inviolate self against the encroachment of the familial maw. It entails living with the guilty feeling that one ought to abandon this unruly attachment to one's inte rio rity in order for matrimony to be the union of trust it is supposed to be. Marriage is about the need to thwart openness while paying homage to it. Despite the violent odyssey of El Salvador and the sexual odyssey of Paris, this is actually a bourgeois domestic novel, in which everything finally collapses into the home, as the tripartite narrative structure finally resolves into several chapters called "House." A reader is likely to think that the Salvador chapters may be simply a reimagining of "the ugly American": A psychotic, PTSD-addled war veteran as the mercenary; Richard and Kevin as the blundering, well-meaning liberal innocents; and Tad as the exploitative outsider making nefarious deals. If there is something bluntly familiar about these characters, the same can be said for Kevin's daughter, April, the spoiled, pouty, self-absorbed teenager whom he cannot truly understand but is oddly bound to by their shared knowledge of her pregnancy. (April keeps her own secret, as she never reveals who the baby's father is.) Then there is Will, Kevin's even-tempered young son, and Linda, the smart, loyal wife who manages domestic life better than her husband. The familiarity of these characters and their desires, all a concoction of Kevin's perspective, is, ironically, what makes the novel absorbing in its simplicity about bourgeois banality and the quest for expression. The book is also quite funny at times. "So Much Blue" is never quite what you expect, only close. ? 'The painting was mine, only mine, I wanted it to be only mine, to mean for me and for me alone.'
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 30, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
Kevin Pace, an artist living with his wife and two children in New England, is working obsessively on a painting in his barn. It is a massive canvas, the object of daily struggles and inner turmoil. No one is allowed to see it, to the vexation of his family and closest friend, Richard, who all worry that he's drinking again. In alternating chapters, Everett (Half an Inch of Water, 2015) presents Kevin in his twenties, accompanying Richard on a harrowing trip to El Salvador to find Richard's drug-dealing brother; in his forties, in Paris for a show and falling in love with a young artist; and in the present, dealing with a fragile marriage all of it tied to a secret that has marked his life and his art. In his always insightful style, Everett offers a portrait of a man sensitive to the slightest nuance of color and composition but often oblivious to the complexities and subtleties of human relationships, a man struggling to unite the pieces of himself into a harmonious whole, a man worthy of love and family.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Art, friendship, family, and sex all jostle for priority of focus in the prolific Everett's contemplative new novel. The plot doesn't so much unfold or tighten but rather follows the idiosyncratic thoughts of its protagonist, a renowned painter named Kevin Pace. Several chapters open with philosophical statements-"I suppose every alcoholic desires to regard himself as simply a harmless drunk." Taking his time, Kevin unspools a story from 30 years ago, another a decade old, and gauges their impact on the present. These plotlines are woven in chapters variously titled "1979," "Paris," and "House." In "1979," when he's 24, Kevin and his close friend Richard take a potentially dangerous trip to El Salvador to find Richard's missing brother, Tad. It doesn't take long for them to stumble into a dangerous situation involving soldiers with M16s. The "Paris" plot charts Kevin's romance with the alluring Victoire, with Richard playing a minor role. And in "House," Kevin is working on a painting, perhaps a masterwork-"a painting has many surfaces," he proclaims-but refuses to show it to his family, or anyone else for that matter. The novel's version of the three ages of man adds yet another level to Everett's intellectually provocative work. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Everett's narrator, Kevin Pace, is a conflicted painter, commercially successful, with a 12' x 20' oil painting in his garage that he refuses to let anyone see. It's in blue, a color he otherwise eschews. Symbolic? Indeed. The novel tracks three story lines: "House" is the present, concerned mainly with the pregnancy of a 15-year-old daughter; "1979" narrates a death-filled trip to revolutionary El Salvador to reclaim his friend Richard's drug-dealing brother; "Paris" details an affair ten years back with a beautiful French watercolorist half his age. All three stories are finely executed in themselves, and they come together-sort of-at the end as Pace discovers he really does love his wife, Linda, and as he returns to El Salvador to visit a small, lonely grave. This book starts slowly but then hits a groove (or three grooves); there's probably more musing on the meaning and significance of colors than will suit the casual reader. VERDICT Literary chameleon Everett can veer from wicked cultural satire (Erasure, one of the most inventive novels of this young century) to absurdism to action fiction; this centrist work will surely appeal to Everett readers, and its self-reflective realism should bring in some new ones as well. [See "Never More Relevant: 50 Books for February, Black History Month, and Beyond," LJ 1/17.]-Robert E. Brown, Oswego, NY © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An artist ponders a painting he wants to keep private along with the back stories that inspired it, the secrets that continue to haunt him.Everett (Half an Inch of Water, 2015, etc.) continues to wrestle with issues such as artistic identity and inspiration, the relation between artists and their art, the notions of what a narrator reveals and conceals, but rarely have the results been as engrossing as this. There are three separate plot strands, skillfully interwoven, each informing the others. In the present tense, protagonist Kevin Pace, the first-person narrator, is obsessed with a large, abstract painting, a work in progress that mixes various shades of blue. He eventually reveals that he's a recovering alcoholic, now a workaholic, absorbed in his painting and his memories while generally removed from his wife and children. Ten years earlier he had a passionate affair in Paris with a Frenchwoman much younger than he. Twenty years before that, he traveled with his best friend to El Salvador, then in the midst of violent revolution, to return his friend's brother to the U.S. The brother was likely involved with drugs, almost certainly using them, perhaps smuggling and dealing them. While there, the artist saw and did things that he has never been able to confess to anyone, but when he returned, he was "distant. Different." He was also committed to marrying the woman who noticed these differences in him, though he'd been unsure about marriage before he left. The story unfolds through short chapters that alternate among the three times and places as the reader learns more about the artist and his painting, but the artist also discovers more about himself: "Ten years earlier I had succumbed to a banal midlife crisis, but now I was falling victim to something far worse, a late-life revelation." The author's deft plotting and wry wit sustain multiple levels of intrigue, not only about how each of the subplots resolves itself, but how they all fit together. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
