A lifetime of secrets and ‘So Much Blue’
You know you’re an artist when, shortly after you arrive in a foreign country that has just begun a civil war, your eye is drawn to the vibrancy of the colors everywhere as much as to the poverty and incipient destruction. In 1979, 24-year-old Kevin Pace, a grad student at Penn and the protagonist of Percival Everett’s enigmatic new novel “So Much Blue,” travels to El Salvador with his friend and fellow student Richard Scott. Richard’s family suspects that younger brother Tad, who has a history of drug offenses, may be in El Salvador. Richard asks Kevin to accompany him, in part because they’re friends but also, as Kevin wryly notes, “Richard claimed to feel secure because I was black.” Once in El Salvador, Kevin can’t help noticing that the country is “rich in blues, more cerulean than the blues at home.” Kevin’s artistic eye will wander many more times over the course of the book’s interlocking narratives, as will his faithfulness to his wife and children. As he has done in previous novels, Everett explores the nature of artistic creation and the many effects an obsession can have on life and family. “A painting has many surfaces,” Kevin says. Yet even as he acknowledges the pedestrian nature of that statement, he recognizes its aptness to his fate, as will the readers of this book.
The short chapters of this first-person narrative cover three significant periods in Kevin’s life. In the first — and seemingly the most harrowing — an American mercenary known as the Bummer, a Vietnam vet prone to using rude epithets for Asians and African-Americans, accepts the job of tracking down Tad. Among the life-altering experiences Kevin undergoes is the sight of a young girl in a cobalt-blue dress — Everett too frequently hammers home Kevin’s attention to color — lying dead in the mud. The events that follow become a story he will keep to himself for many decades thereafter.
The El Salvador chapters are told in hardboiled prose that differs from the tone of the rest of the book. Markedly different are the Paris chapters, set many years later. While in Paris with his wife, Linda, Kevin meets an artist 25 years his junior with whom he begins an affair after Linda returns to the States and he stays behind for a show of his work.
Despite its initial reliance on storytelling clichés — Kevin agrees to visit the artist’s studio to see her watercolor paintings — the Paris chapters show a man not quite 40, not quite over a drinking problem brought on by depression, not quite sure what he wants from the remainder of his life. He’s not even sure he still wants to be an artist. As he tells Victoire, the younger woman, he doesn’t like to visit museums because “it’s where art comes to die.”
The novel’s third section is set in the present day. Kevin and Linda are still married. He teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design, a job he applied for when, as the father of two children, he needed to “be a more responsible, parent-type person.” He is now a workaholic rather than an alcoholic, although, as he acknowledges, “one addiction was as bad as the next.” His current addiction is a massive, secret painting on raw linen that he is working on in a studio “that looks like a foaling barn.” No one is allowed to see it — not Linda, not their son, Will, and not their 16-year-old daughter, April, who adds to Kevin’s many worries when she confides to him that she is pregnant. Parts of “So Much Blue” read like a detective thriller, but the novel is far more philosophical than a run-of-the-mill mystery. The many philosophical asides — Kevin discourses about the difference between good sense and common sense and refers to Hume and transubstantiation — are among the book’s many distinguishing touches. As is the book’s treatment of race: Although Everett, who is black, notes Kevin’s skin color, the plot doesn’t hinge upon it. Depending upon one’s perspective, readers will find this authorial decision either a refreshing declaration that race shouldn’t matter or a missed opportunity for added complexity.
But the focus of “So Much Blue” is on an artist trying to communicate the vagaries of existence and wondering whether the quest for posterity is worth the struggle. Late in the book, Kevin asks Linda: If you had a flat stone that was perfect for skipping, would you throw it or keep it? If you throw it, you’ll either savor a perfect splash or mess up the toss. If you keep it, it’s yours forever, but you’ll die without knowing what it can do. In Everett’s eloquent telling, art and life are like that stone: beautiful and rare, and the source of myriad choices.
Michael Magras is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. His work has appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer and Miami Herald.