Road story about who gets run over in the race for cool
My Camino is a riotous look at friendship, modern art and what gets lost along the way to fame
Patrick Warner’s novel My Camino wears many hats.
It’s a complicated tale of friendship, rife with shifting loyalties. It’s a story about defiant misfits and an examination of race and gender identity. It’s a rollicking and freewheeling road story. But most of all — at heart — it’s a scathing, riotous look at the contemporary art world.
Budsy is a down-and-out conceptual artist who catches the eye of a big-time art collector at an edgy New York opening. Despite his obvious talent for turning the art world on its ear, it’s the efforts of ambitious Floss, his lover and erstwhile promoter, who gets Budsy his big break. Narrated for the most part by the Apostle John, Budsy’s old pal and fellow Brooklyn artist, the novel follows these three from their serendipitous early days through the highs and lows of scheming, dreaming — and occasional artmaking.
Warner’s writing throughout is electric. It’s boisterous, bawdy, turbocharged and entirely entertaining. Apostle John is the best kind of narrator — loudly confident one moment, humble and introspective the next, a man of sage opinions and witty, often heartbreaking anecdotes about Budsy and Floss, migration, philosophy, music, and the world at large. Reading the book feels like sidling up to the bar with a highly intelligent and hilarious new companion.
Once Warner has gained our listening ear, he shifts the narrative into a critical examination of the intersection of art, capitalism and the social world. As Apostle John unpacks his growing unease with Budsy’s blistering fame — and his own experiences of alienation — race, identity and the race for cool become powerful touchstones upon which the novel turns.
The book picks up steam when the three set out for an impromptu biking tour of Spain’s famed Camino in advance of Budsy’s hyped new show in Dublin. It’s here on the Camino where they each in turn re-evaluate their lives, probing old wounds and encountering all manner of religious pilgrims, neardisasters, and deeply existential questions along the way.
The novel’s culmination during the NIGHT OF NIGHTS at the fabled mansion of Budsy’s morally compromised backer is high drama and superb climax. Warner exposes the hypocrisy of the contemporary art scene, a world where art is surface and commodity and where artists must game the system to succeed or be destroyed. At what cost, asks Warner. How far will Budsy and Floss go to realize their burning ambitions?
My Camino is an energizing read, a book that asks cheeky and powerful questions about what it means to create (or abstain) in the early 21st century.