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    So Much Blue
    So Much Blue
    So Much Blue
    Audiobook7 hours

    So Much Blue

    Written by Percival Everett

    Narrated by Patrick Lawlor

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Kevin Pace is working on a painting that he won't allow anyone to see: not his children; not his best friend, Richard; not even his wife, Linda. The painting is a canvas of twelve feet by twenty-one feet (and three inches) that is covered entirely in shades of blue. It may be his masterpiece or it may not; he doesn't know or, more accurately, doesn't care.

    What Kevin does care about are the events of the past. Ten years ago he had an affair with a young watercolorist in Paris. Kevin relates this event with a dispassionate air, even a bit of puzzlement. It's not clear to him why he had the affair, but he can't let it go. In the more distant past of the late seventies, Kevin and Richard traveled to El Salvador on the verge of war to retrieve Richard's drug-dealing brother, who had gone missing without explanation. As the events of the past intersect with the present, Kevin struggles to justify the sacrifices he's made for his art and the secrets he's kept from his wife.

    So Much Blue features Percival Everett at his best, and his deadpan humor and insightful commentary about the artistic life culminate in a brilliantly readable new novel.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateJun 13, 2017
    ISBN9781681685663
    So Much Blue
    Author

    Percival Everett

    Percival Everett is the author of over thirty books, including So Much Blue, Telephone, Dr No and The Trees, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and won the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. He has received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His novel Erasure has now been adapted into the major film American Fiction. He lives in Los Angeles.

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    Reviews for So Much Blue

    4/5

    59 ratings4 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Another instance in which I was caught by a beautiful cover. The story itself was very boring, ponderously so, and I just didn't care about the characters.
    • 5/5
      TOB--I loved this book. I couldn't wait to have time to read. There were three story lines and all were good. They were somewhat connected and it all came together well in the end. I didn't realize that Percival Everett had written so many books.
    • 5/5
      It didn't take a genius to see this was not a good proposition, but it did take an idiot not to see it.Kevin Pace is an artist. A successful artist. He's done well enough to own an ample house, with outbuildings and to send his children to a private school. And he's not happy, because of course. But there's more to it than that, and Everett takes us through three times in Kevin's life that shaped him.The first is in 1979, when the brother of his best friend and college roommate disappears in El Salvador and his friend convinces him that they need to go there and find him. This is, as anyone with the slightest knowledge of Central America at that time, is a terrible, terrible idea. But Kevin doesn't require much convincing, because Richard is his best friend and needs his help. He's certainly a lot more attuned to the potential dangers than his suburban-raised white friend, but he goes anyway. And so they walk into a burgeoning war zone. The second is when his children are small and he and his wife go to Paris when a French gallery is going to show his work. He stays behind for a few weeks after his wife returns home to prepare the show, but really because he has met a French woman half his age. And finally, back in Kevin's present, in his comfortable middle-age, as he continues to mess up his life. He has a painting; an enormous work that sits alone in its own outbuilding. No one, including his wife, is allowed to see it and his desire to protect that work from anyone's eyes but his own is another way in which he distances himself from those who love him. And when his daughter needs him, he wants to be there for her, but a lifetime of distance means he can't see the obvious answers. For awhile now, I've been bored with the WMFuN* because of the sheer number of them I've read in my life. So I should have hated So Much Blue, which is, after all, about a well-off guy who makes a mess of things. But Percival Everett writes so well, and does such a wonderful job in bringing the main character to life, that I was drawn into the novel despite myself. That Kevin wasn't another white guy did help, but mostly it was that he was so clear-eyed about everything he did. Kevin never blamed anyone else for the situations he found himself in and he was so aware of how the things he did affected others that it was impossible not to like him. Everett is an assured writer, who knows exactly what he's doing every step of the way. I enjoyed this book enormously.* WMFuN: white male fuck-up novel. A genre with a long and illustrious history. After all, it's the default plot for much of literature. And it's a tired and overdone genre in which it's nearly impossible to say something new.
    • 4/5
      From the opening pages, Percival Everett's So Much Blue is very much the cliché you hope it will not be. The artist, past the peak in his life and career, putting his all into one last great work. He wonders if it is his masterpiece, hoping no one ever lays eyes on it. The artist, reflecting back on his life, in particular, the affair he had in Paris with a young artist half his age. Of course the artist drinks far too much. Even the book acknowledges the cliché. As I read that first day, maybe two, I was distracted, wondering what I'd read after I finished (or gave up on) this dead, dead horse.At some point, I began to tolerate the cliché. And then it seemed as if it became nothing more than a backdrop to an increasingly riveting story. Tied in with the present and the affair of ten years ago is a third period, the earliest, about the artist's trip to El Salvador during a time the country was descending into chaos. As the three periods grow more enmeshed, the story as a whole begins to coalesce. It never escapes the cliché completely, but it molds it and crafts a tale that somehow makes the banal elements work to its advantage. In the end, this novel questions the elusiveness of defining trust, love, and sacrifice, an undertaking as illusory as defining various gradients of color.While I'd heard of Everett years ago, this is my first actual outing with the author. I've heard him described as one of the most underrated authors at present. Although I cannot attest to such an assertion based on one novel, I certainly see the possibility of such a truth. So Much Blue shows significant brilliance in craft and thought. I never fully escaped the constrictions of the cliché and this is the only reason I finally settled on four out of five stars; however, know that this is a very strong four star rating and I very much look forward to reading more from this author.