So Much Blue

April 10, 2017
Art, friendship, family, and sex all jostle for priority of focus in the prolific Everett’s contemplative new novel. The plot doesn’t so much unfold or tighten but rather follows the idiosyncratic thoughts of its protagonist, a renowned painter named Kevin Pace. Several chapters open with philosophical statements—“I suppose every alcoholic desires to regard himself as simply a harmless drunk.” Taking his time, Kevin unspools a story from 30 years ago, another a decade old, and gauges their impact on the present. These plotlines are woven in chapters variously titled “1979,” “Paris,” and “House.” In “1979,” when he’s 24, Kevin and his close friend Richard take a potentially dangerous trip to El Salvador to find Richard’s missing brother, Tad. It doesn’t take long for them to stumble into a dangerous situation involving soldiers with M16s. The “Paris” plot charts Kevin’s romance with the alluring Victoire, with Richard playing a minor role. And in “House,” Kevin is working on a painting, perhaps a masterwork—“a painting has many surfaces,” he proclaims—but refuses to show it to his family, or anyone else for that matter. The novel’s version of the three ages of man adds yet another level to Everett’s intellectually provocative work.

Starred review from April 1, 2017
An artist ponders a painting he wants to keep private along with the back stories that inspired it, the secrets that continue to haunt him.Everett (Half an Inch of Water, 2015, etc.) continues to wrestle with issues such as artistic identity and inspiration, the relation between artists and their art, the notions of what a narrator reveals and conceals, but rarely have the results been as engrossing as this. There are three separate plot strands, skillfully interwoven, each informing the others. In the present tense, protagonist Kevin Pace, the first-person narrator, is obsessed with a large, abstract painting, a work in progress that mixes various shades of blue. He eventually reveals that he's a recovering alcoholic, now a workaholic, absorbed in his painting and his memories while generally removed from his wife and children. Ten years earlier he had a passionate affair in Paris with a Frenchwoman much younger than he. Twenty years before that, he traveled with his best friend to El Salvador, then in the midst of violent revolution, to return his friend's brother to the U.S. The brother was likely involved with drugs, almost certainly using them, perhaps smuggling and dealing them. While there, the artist saw and did things that he has never been able to confess to anyone, but when he returned, he was "distant. Different." He was also committed to marrying the woman who noticed these differences in him, though he'd been unsure about marriage before he left. The story unfolds through short chapters that alternate among the three times and places as the reader learns more about the artist and his painting, but the artist also discovers more about himself: "Ten years earlier I had succumbed to a banal midlife crisis, but now I was falling victim to something far worse, a late-life revelation." 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.

COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 1, 2017

Prolific and prodigiously talented novelist Everett tells the story of a painter who will not show his wife, children, or his best friend his work in progress, made up all of shades of blue.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2017
Kevin Pace, an artist living with his wife and two children in New England, is working obsessively on a painting in his barn. It is a massive canvas, the object of daily struggles and inner turmoil. No one is allowed to see it, to the vexation of his family and closest friend, Richard, who all worry that he's drinking again. In alternating chapters, Everett (Half an Inch of Water, 2015) presents Kevin in his twenties, accompanying Richard on a harrowing trip to El Salvador to find Richard's drug-dealing brother; in his forties, in Paris for a show and falling in love with a young artist; and in the present, dealing with a fragile marriageall of it tied to a secret that has marked his life and his art. In his always insightful style, Everett offers a portrait of a man sensitive to the slightest nuance of color and composition but often oblivious to the complexities and subtleties of human relationships, a man struggling to unite the pieces of himself into a harmonious whole, a man worthy of love and family.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

July 31, 2017
Audiobook veteran Lawlor rises to the challenges presented by the latest novel from Everett. The story gradually weaves together three sprawling threads in the life of painter Kevin Pace: his current life as a husband and father raising two teenagers in a picturesque New England community, an extramarital affair with a young woman in Paris a decade ago, and a violent journey through war-torn El Salvador 30 years previously. Lawlor remains poised as the threads intertwine. He is particularly gifted in his empathetic rendering of the angst-ridden 16-year-old daughter, April, as she seeks parental help after getting pregnant, but the most memorable parts of the audiobook are the flashbacks to El Salvador involving a mysterious American mercenary known as “the Bummer.” The audiobook requires patience and attention to detail given Everett’s contemplative style of writing and slow pacing, but Lawlor demonstrates his talent throughout the journey. A Graywolf hardcover.

February 15, 2017

Everett's narrator, Kevin Pace, is a conflicted painter, commercially successful, with a 12' x 20' oil painting in his garage that he refuses to let anyone see. It's in blue, a color he otherwise eschews. Symbolic? Indeed. The novel tracks three story lines: "House" is the present, concerned mainly with the pregnancy of a 15-year-old daughter; "1979" narrates a death-filled trip to revolutionary El Salvador to reclaim his friend Richard's drug-dealing brother; "Paris" details an affair ten years back with a beautiful French watercolorist half his age. All three stories are finely executed in themselves, and they come together--sort of--at the end as Pace discovers he really does love his wife, Linda, and as he returns to El Salvador to visit a small, lonely grave. This book starts slowly but then hits a groove (or three grooves); there's probably more musing on the meaning and significance of colors than will suit the casual reader. VERDICT Literary chameleon 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 new ones as well. [See "Never More Relevant: 50 Books for February, Black History Month, and Beyond," LJ 1/17.]--Robert E. Brown, Oswego, NY

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.