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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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