An intense and haunting book. ( )

Reason read: AAC
Percival Everett is a new author to me. This is the second book I read this month. I preferred The Trees to this one but this one was good too. An artist, husband, father of two is reviewing the secrets in his life; a painting, his daughter's secret, an affair, and what happened in El Salvador. The books structure is short chapters under three alternating headings: “House,” for the present; “Paris,” covering the affair and set around 1999; and “1979,” the section set in El Salvador. I enjoyed the book. The author also is an artist. ( )

The book starts off exactly the way I think of an Everett book would start. With maths or dimensions. We understand that he is talking about a canvas and pretty a large one, and then he moves onto the dimensions of the room, not just the square footage but also the volume. This canvas is for a painting that no one else is allowed to see, it has a title but no one else has heard it and this painting sits there, hidden for the rest of the story but trailing a line through everything that happens.

Kevin Pace is a succesful artist, his children go to a private school and he and his wife are able to go to Paris and spend some time there. It is at this point that the story splits and we find out about three key events in Pace's life which have a hold on him and are secrets. Can a story be a tryptich?

1979 tells of the time when at the age of 22 Pace visited El Salvador with his best friend Richard to find Richard's brother and bring him home. It just so happened that this was the time the country was descending into war and so events overtook them. This story feels like a coming-of-age story.

House tells of Pace's domestic life, his absences even when he is physically there, his drinking and his painting and his relationship with Linda his wife. It turns out that he has many things he can't tell her about and this lack of trust leads to problems in their marriage.

The third story takes place in Paris where Pace has an affair with a woman less than half his age, a rather cliched idea but a perfect cliche for yet another secret. This is his mid-life crisis. It is here that Pace describes his life as a painting that is static, hardly a story at all, 'moving but with no moving parts' (p54).

These three stories run in parallel until we start to get some cross-over, first just through phrases being repeated in each story such as 'the walls come caving in' and we get the colour blue in all its variations appearing in each story, linked to the secrets and times in his life that have been difficult. There's a blue dress, one time it is cobalt blue, another royal blue, there is blue black, the manganese blue of the sky, light blue of socks, the blue of the night and of daylight.

. . . I saw the blue of rain, how it tinged the darkness of night sapphire and how Alice blue made lavender the leading edge of morning.
p208

Blue is a colour of trust and loyalty and is the one colour that Pace does not use in his work because he can not control it. In the story it is connected to trauma and secrets.

There is quite a bit of threeness in the book: three stories, three decades of marriage, three reasons for not telling his wife about their daughter's pregnancy, the phrase 'so much blue' said three times and then there are the dimensions of the canvas mentioned at the start of the book - 'twenty one feet and three inches across'. There are the spare three inches, all needed, but the number is also divisible by three. So we do get some of Everett's genre play because here he is using a fairy tale trope where three is 'just right'. Even when asking his wife to marry him, Pace jokes that she is third on the list.

Eventually the story of House takes over, subsuming the others and Pace finally faces up to his life and the hold the secrets have had over him. He makes a decision and it would seem is redeemed.

I think of Everett as a comentator on race and whilst it is not at the forefront of this story, it is there in the background. Richard tells Kevin he is glad to have him with him when he walks through a predominantly African-American neighbourhood. It makes him feel safer. He describes jazz clubs as if they are churches with people sitting around - white churches. He doesn't like the saying 'calling a spade a spade'. They are low key in the story but they are there.

This is the story of the hold over a man's life that secrets and trauma can have and how art can reveal that trauma or emotion without it ever being said.

A picture is a secret about a secret.
Diane Arbus, Epigraph

And so it is in this story. So much blue. ( )

Rating 3.75

Everett shows yet another voice with the story of Kevin Pace, a black father, husband and artist who's search for truth and redemption becomes his challenge. Engaging, 'blue' and evocative, it demonstrates the author's chameleon-like ability with genre and narrative POV.

As with many plots, the story toggles between the past and the present. We first meet Pace at home in the present where he keeps secret his latest works of art. But in 1979, his younger brother disappears so he enrolls his best friend Richard on a hunt to El Salvador where civil war has blossomed. A troublemaker, Tad's 'habits' become suspect.

We return to the present where Pace has been told of a gallery opportunity in Paris. With the embers of love fading, he invites his wife Linda with hopes to improve their relationship. Days later his wife decides to return leaving Pace to continue the journey. Unsettled emotionally, Kevin comes across a beautiful French girl putting him in an awkward position.

Finding an American in a war torn foreign country is no simple feat especially when you have no idea where to start. Strangers in a strange land, Kevin and Richard grow anxious while Bummer, their unruly 'guide' remains strangely calm.

Back in the present, Pace learns his teen daughter April is pregnant and stupidly agrees to keep it from his wife, though as with other 'private matters', his conscience comes into play.

Like most of Everett's stories, its focused on the human condition; and its for this reason he's a favorite. Characters are relatable as are plots; emotion and truth, the themes. Its my opinion that great authors dig into their own experience and share it through storytelling to both 'vet' their humanity and 'come clean'.

While well written, its tedious due to the 'ping pong' game and a bit predictable but overall, definitely worth reading.

( )

“I looked across the dining room at a small canvas of mine. There was no blue in it. It was often pointed out that I avoided blue. It was true. I was uncomfortable with the color. I could never control it. It was nearly always a source of warmth in the under painting, but it was never on the surface, never more than an idea on any work. Regardless that blue was so likable, a color that so many loved or liked—no one hated blue—I could not use it. The color of trust, loyalty, a subject for philosophical discourse, the name of a musical form, blue was not mine.”

This book follows three timelines in the life of artist Kevin Pace. The chapters rotate among the three. They are entitled 1979, Paris, and House. In 1979, he is in his twenties. He has journeyed to El Salvador during a civil war to help his friend, Richard, find his brother and bring him home. In Paris, at age forty-six, Kevin is having a midlife crisis, staying in the city while his wife travels home, meeting a younger woman, and exhibiting his artwork. In the section entitled House, he is fifty-six years old living in the Northeast US with his wife and two teenage children. He is working on a secret painting.

The dramatic tension is maintained by curiosity – the reader wants to find out what happened during these three periods. We wonder why the painting is a secret, what happened in El Salvador, and how the current family drama will turn out. The three stories contain common threads. By the end, we find out more about Kevin’s character, and he finds out more about himself.

Kevin comes across as a likeable, but flawed, character. He worries he is not a good father. He feels guilty about his past. At times he seems distant and depressed. But he also exhibits amazing resourcefulness when needed and comes through for his friend. He is changed by his experiences, especially the episode in El Salvador. It is not what I would call a funny book, but the author uses humor in an effective way.

I really like the way Everett portrays how life happens, and we do not always realize the significance of certain events until much later. The secrets Kevin has harbored have changed him in ways he has not previously figured out. The joy of this book is watching him connect the dots. We know somehow life will be better for him in the future.

This is my first book by Percival Everett. I am impressed by his writing. I sometimes wonder how I have missed reading such an accomplished author until now. He has compiled a significant body of work, so I will definitely be investigating his back catalogue.
( )