TAKE CREEK, FOR EXAMPLE

An unnamed photography student stalks the grounds of his elite art school in search of the truth about a mysterious fellow student.

The narrator of Rugeley’s punchy debut is entering his senior year at Take Creek, a private art school in upstate New York. Something of a photography prodigy, he earned admittance with a portfolio he shot in a San Francisco homeless camp in which he developed his “ragged and seedy aesthetic.” Since then, however, in spite of the tutelage of his world-famous mentor, Salter, the narrator has lost his way. He’s hard at work in his senior year, “struggling with a new series on process and color…shooting pictures of very small objects and then repurposing them in other completely irrelevant frames,” when Salter gives him an assignment: Surveil Take Creek’s new hotshot transfer student, Manning, who Salter believes is there to destroy his career. What follows is a wry, absurdist, at times achingly earnest romp through the darker crannies of metamodernist philosophy as it plays out on Take Creek’s campus. As the students and teachers become more deeply embroiled in the paranoia, isolation, and ennui that seems to imbue both the snow-smothered landscape and their art, the reader is periodically encouraged to consider the concurrent suffering that afflicts the world outside the school’s rarefied halls with paragraphs that report dystopian-skewed (fictional) current events juxtaposed against the mechanics of art-making at Take Creek. This technique reveals a narrator who is aware of the discrepancy between what is at stake in his art and what is at stake in reality, but unclear, as of yet, how to apply himself to bridging that gap. The result is a book full of loopy energy told with a terse, self-conscious sincerity reminiscent of a young man in a Salinger story who can find neither himself, nor anyone else, through the miasma of his own ideas.

An entertaining, unsettling exploration of the making of meaninglessness.