Review: So Much Blue by Percival Everett

Reviewed by Riley Mang

So Much Blue
A Novel by Percival Everett
Graywolf Press, June 2017
$16.00, 257 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1555977825

Percival Everett’s latest novel, So Much Blue, begins with a foretelling epigraph, a quote from the late photographer, Diane Arbus: “A picture is a secret about a secret.” What ensues is a triptych novel which follows one artist at three crucial times in his life during which secrets are made and kept hidden from those closest to him.

The structure of the novel is perhaps its most stunning and intriguing element, as it navigates the reader through alternating time periods in the protagonist’s life. The narrator points our attention to this in the opening lines of the prologue: “I will begin with dimensions. As one should.” The protagonist, Kevin Pace, goes on to describe the dimensions of his canvas on which he paints, in secret, the secrets from his past. “. . . my canvas is twelve feet high and twenty-one feet and three inches across. I cannot explain the three inches, but can say that they are crucial to the work.”

As the novel alternates between three times and places, this canvas quickly becomes a metaphor for the story in which inexplicable moments can have everlasting effects on a life.

In a distant past, Kevin travels to El Salvador in search of his friend’s brother who has mysteriously gone missing. In this tale, we see the artist as a young man in the midst of graduate school, throwing himself into a country on the brink of civil war. Pace and his best friend, Richard, recruit the aid of The Bummer, a racist Vietnam vet-turned-mercenary, in order to navigate the chaos before it boils over. Naive and sheltered, Kevin and Richard experience an irreversible loss of innocence that haunts them, especially Kevin, long after they return to the US.

Flashing forward several years, in a more recent past, Kevin is a married artist selling his work in Paris when he meets a young and seductive watercolorist named Victoire. The two indulge in a rapid love affair in which Pace feels a new part of himself that he never knew existed. In her fresh embrace, Pace is able to divulge the secrets that he has kept hidden from his wife, Linda, since he returned from El Salvador many years before. He looks at his life from a distance as he is entering a new chapter—one with young children, a loving wife, and a house in the suburbs— and wonders if he could give that up for this new thrill.

Years later, the reader finds Pace in his Northeastern family life, a recovering alcoholic and distant father. He wonders how to get closer to his son, Ian, and angsty teenage daughter, April, who, surprisingly, confides in him with a secret of her own. His family is perturbed by the canvas he keeps hidden in his farmhouse studio which he allows no one to enter. He plots ways to destroy it in case he dies unexpectedly because the canvas reveals his inner secrets which he is not yet ready to share with those closest to him.

At the center of each worldly vignette is Kevin’s wife Linda who grounds him to his life in the US. She is the centrifugal force around which Kevin circumnavigates his external and internal worlds in search of himself and the truth. This portrait of the imperfect but nevertheless unbreakable bond between the spouses provides the protagonist with a home to place his burdens until he is ready to allow the love in that home to release him from them.

The novel reads as a coming-of-age adventure and romance story, providing insight into modern American family life as well as the various stages at which the individual develops different versions of the self. The first-person narration welcomes the reader into the most intimate version of the protagonist that anyone in his life has seen. He confides in us, and we laugh and cry along with him through these portraits.

Percival Everett is considered one of contemporary America’s most prolific yet least discussed authors. A professor at USC, he has written over 30 works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that interrogate art and society with his graceful voice and ironical twists. Released by Graywolf Press in 2016, So Much Blue has delivered its celebrated author into a wider audience beyond the devoted literary corners his works have lived in throughout his career. His latest novel has been received as one of his best, a whirlwind of adventure and earnest contemplation. His fans, new and old, are looking forward to his next project, The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, VA 1843, Annotated from the Library of John C. Calhoun, a mock historical guidebook for slave owners in America, to be released by Red Hen Press this Fall.

Riley Mang is LAR’s Editor-at-Large. Find more of her work here.