A passionate meditation on art wrapped in a hilarious sendup of artistic pretensions.
A magic elixir that confers stupendous creative powers on talentless people sets the art world on its ear in this satirical novel.
When Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art sets up a “BE AN ARTIST” stunt exhibition that lets ordinary museumgoers try their hands at art, what emerges are the two greatest works of the age: Ragnarök and Roll, a Play-Doh sculpture of a bomb made by a foul-mouthed 10-year-old named Timmy O’Donnell, and Migration, a paper bird mobile by 73-year-old tyro Tabitha Masterson. Art students start worshipping Masterson as the goddess Bitha. Mediocre art critic Jasper Duckworth figures he can make his reputation by championing the two prodigies, but soon a disappointing truth emerges: Their bolt-from-the-blue artistic capabilities are the result of imbibing water from the MCA’s third-floor drinking fountain. The fountain’s potion grants everyone who swallows it the capacity to produce just one magnificent piece—and then kills the artist. The implications roil the denizens of Chicago’s art scene. Struggling sculptor Jawbone Walker drinks the water and makes an arty chair that priapically invigorates an older man who sits in it; Ross Robards, a legless Vietnam veteran and mass-market painter, abhors the fountain’s potential to make anyone an effortlessly great artist, especially because it competes with his own promise to teach anyone how to be a great artist through his instructional TV show. Sculptor Bob Bellio rejects the water but then has his sublime pieces dismissed as products of the fountain; schoolteacher-turned–art-groupie Emma—she specializes in plaster casts of genitalia—sees her libido intensify after she sips the water; and Duckworth schemes to take advantage of the water’s power without consuming it himself.
Hay’s yarn is a cynical, bawdy spoof of an art establishment whose cult of idealism and authenticity barely camouflages a crass hunger for fame and fortune. (“What have you done, Timmy? Duckworth thinks. You’ve ruined this masterpiece and turned it into the media’s culpability in war, genocide, and homelessness....But then a clearer notion: I’ve got an exclusive.”) Yet the raucous novel also takes the artistic life and creative process seriously. (“Once, maybe twice,” Bob “consciously uses a technique he learned from somewhere; the rest of the time it is pure instinct. Pure flow. Pure energy….The earth is a scratched stained wooden table. The sky behind him, a place where the sparks of tiny pieces of metal from the grinding wheel shoot up like tiny rockets.”) The author is given to flights of surrealism: “You’ve been grifting and scamming them with your camera…you’re a fraud,” a talking squirrel says, egging on a suicidal photographer. Hay’s writerly voice sounds a bit like David Foster Wallace in a gonzo vein, with lots of cultural riffs, esoteric footnotes, a profusion of characters and subplots with obscure connections, and imagery that’s sensual and evocative but in a coolly analytical way. (A man “turns and catches Not Trudy loping with a laid back stride, hips swinging freely but not for show. All her movements utilize an additional five degrees of body movement, giving her not an exaggerated effect, but one of a body enjoying being in motion.”) It’s a baggy story with third-act problems, but the author’s gorgeous prose and comic inventiveness make for an entrancing read.
A passionate meditation on art wrapped in a hilarious sendup of artistic pretensions.Pub Date: March 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-952600-04-3
Page Count: 433
Publisher: Whisk(e)y Tit
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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