Product Description
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.
Reviews/Praise
"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." —Kirkus Starred Review
"So Much Blue explores the dimensions of human experience as few books can." —Shelf Awareness Starred Review
"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." —New York Times
"Finely executed. . . . Literary chameleon [Percival] 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 news ones as well." —Library Journal
"[A] tightly wound and slow-burning new novel." —Vulture
"So Much Blue is such a perfectly structured novel . . . It's a generous, thrilling book by a man who might well be America's most under-recognized literary master, and readers will be thinking about it long after the last page." —NPR
"The novel’s ruminations on confidences and loyalty are cleverly explored through punchy, dry humor — Kevin’s time in San Salvador is filled with surprising comedy — and Everett’s writing is, as ever, filled with heart." —The Gazette
"The realism is masterfully executed, the literary trope perfectly deployed." —Orlando Weekly