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This summer, catch up on the best five art novels published this year. They range from a beguiling dive into the psyche of a late performance artist shattering the barrier between fact and fiction, to a hilarious portrait of creativity and class.
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The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor
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Writers, artists, and dancers attending a certain graduate program in Iowa are all trying to figure out life, love, and the creative process. Money keeps making it all harder. Brandon Taylor’s new novel is one of the most compelling looks at the ways class impacts creativity. In seminars and over drinks, characters hold debates, their dialogue doubling as pithy criticism and caricatures thereof (a classmate insists, “Where were the anti-capitalist critiques?”). They discuss the expectations to mine personal trauma for art, and the price of doing so; or grapple with that ubiquotous conundrum: what to do when the art is bad but the politics are good (or vice versa).
Taylor’s creative-type caricatures, anxious for validation, are searing. There’s the professor who is “never quite in contention for the Pulitzer, but never quite out of it either,” and a classmate who writes “poems about dying children and pubic lice.” Taylor captures how creative work, if you’re not an egomaniac, often feels extremely embarrassing.
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A Rock, A River, A Street by Steffani Jemison
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Steffani Jemison―an artist you may recognize from recent biennials like Greater New York, Counterpublic, and the Whitney Biennial―recently made her fiction debut. In this short novella, a protagonist gives up speaking for several years. But in inner monologues, she reflects on quotidian urban experiences, then imagines mining them for artworks, leaving their meaning and significance implied. Elsewhere, she reflects on things that sound evocative, but clarifies when they are not: “I ignore the flickers around the edges of my vision, which sounds poetic,” Jemison writes, “except that they are probably rats.” The narrator, an aging runner forced to slow down, is observant, curious, and imaginative. She convincingly infers details about the lives of strangers she encounters on subways and in grocery stores. It’s a compelling record of an artist processing the world around her.
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Life is Everywhere by Lucy Ives
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I can say with confidence that you haven’t read anything like this before. Stories, manuscripts, art criticism, and even a utility bill are all nestled within this strange, engrossing novel. The protagonist, Erin, is a writer and a graduate student, and the 400-plus page book takes place in the span of 24 hours. Readers journey through the contents of Erin’s bag and follow her trains of thought as she dissociates: we are ricocheted between her past experiences, miscellaneous manuscripts, and the present, an eventful day during which Erin finds herself locked out of her apartment.
It is a book, really, about the dizzying relationship between trauma and the creative process: how the former can both compel you toward and prevent you from the latter. An artist makes an appearance to think through such an idea: Erin writes on the German conceptualist Hanne Darboven, who experienced hypergraphia, or compulsive writing. One wonders whether this is a form of genius, madness, or a trauma response―and whether the protagonist fits the criteria for diagnosis, too.
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Your Love Is Not Good by Johanna Hedva
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Johanna Hedva’s anticipated novel compellingly captures the experience of inhabiting the art world without the safety net of generational wealth. Our Korean American artist-protagonist tells stories of trying to fit in, of going into debt, of experiencing luxury (ostrich eggs with truffle, designer clothes) while struggling to afford rent. Hedva sears the artist-gallerist relationship, showing the ways dependency can so quickly breed exploitation, the ways that the wealthy buy friends.
When the narrator paints a series focused on a white model, saying she “wanted to paint a beautiful white woman as if we stood on equal ground, as if we had equal access to the meaning in the image,” her show sells out. But she quickly realizes that her white collectors are drawn to the pretty woman and oblivious to the racial commentary. Meanwhile, her friend, a Black artist named Yves, struggles to afford rent as the market shifts “toward being explicit about politics, [meaning] that Yves’s position of being implicit was falling out of favor.” He adds, “Of course I want to talk about Blackness, but I don’t want you to know it’s coming!”
It’s a story about being compelled to create, and all the compromises and complexes that arise when you try to making a living in the art world, where you are so often beholden to wealthy white people.
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Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
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Biography of X is an unusual spin on a familiar story—one about love and loss. The narrator mourns her late wife, a performance artist, and, in the process, comes face to face with how little she knows of her beloved’s biography. She investigates, ostensibly in search of closure, but X only emerges more mysterious. The book is chock full of art world Easter eggs—fictional spins on major artists. When Lacey pens a made-up reply to X from Adrian Piper, she nails the artist’s analytical voice. In another emblematic scene, X one-ups Sophie Calle, stalking the artist whose practice revolves around following and being followed. Calle’s spirit looms over the whole book: both the artist and the protagonist-MacGuffin blur the boundary between performance and life, desire and neurosis. It’s a story about the way art and literature help us narrate the chaos of life, but risk delusion.