4.5 ⭐️ Rounded up

My first Percival Everett novel and I would like more, please.My full review is available here. An excerpt:In So Much Blue we have a muted, sober rendering of what seems to be a cliché: that of the financially well-off bourgeois artist coming to terms with his life in his 50s. It’s not an easy novel to talk about or even recommend; what sounds terribly pedestrian in the description is, of course, something else entirely in Everett’s hands. The book’s narrator is Kevin Pace, now a respected abstr...

Percival Everett blows the doors off with this beautifully constructed novel that holds secrets and mysteries in each of its three stories centered about Kevin, a fifty-something abstract painter living in New England with his wife and two children. I do wonder about Everett, who so gradually has become one of America’s most reliably exciting and unique novelists that his anonymity lasted long enough for him to enjoy some walking-around time without celebrity recognition. That’s probably well ov...

Every other Everett novel has been a 5 star memorably great read for me, but this one was a miss. The narrator struck me as self-indulgent rather than sincere. The novel is written as an interwoven story of three time frames in the narrator's life, titled "Paris," "House," and "1979."I flat-out disliked the "Paris" chapters. I had a general cranky attitude about the story of this man skanking about with a much younger woman behind his wife's back--perhaps it's a sign of current events that I cou...

When I finished the last page of this gorgeous novel, I held the paperback against my heart, rocked, cried, and moaned, "Oh." That's about all you need to know.

Something about this cover said jazz, cocktails, and mysterious woman in dimly lit club . I knew there was an extra-marital affair between a water-colourist and an older married man so I was getting ready for some good doomed love affair reading. It all seemed very promising. Unfortunately, I am going to declare I found this all rather bland and ponderous. Chapters alternate between three events in the narrators life, a trip in his twenties to El Salvador, a moment in Paris when he has an affa...

4.5 stars, rounded up.While I'm not one of those people who believes every painting needs to have meaning, on more than one occasion I've looked at an abstract piece and wondered just what the artist was striving for. Sometimes a painting strikes me initially as simply a jumble of colors or shapes or objects, but after looking at it a few times, suddenly everything clicks into place and makes sense.That's how I felt about So Much Blue by Percival Everett. I'd seen some tremendously positive

Shortlisted for the Tournament of Books 2018! “I had come to love the power of secrets and saw every painting as a secret waiting to be revealed.”Kevin Pace is a husband, father and painter. He is also a man with secrets. An alcoholic who doesn’t always make the right decisions, some might consider him a hot mess. And he is. But he is an endearing character because he is introspective, willing to admit his mistakes. So Much Blue shifts back and forth between three different time periods:

“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 philoso...

Not sure what to say about this, other than that I really enjoyed it. Its tripartite alternating chapters structure works really well, and it has an almost propulsive narrative drive...one of those books you keep promising yourself to lay aside after just one more chapter...then one more...then... It basically follows the exploits of one Kevin Pace, an artist, in three separate time periods: in 1979, in his mid 20's, he accompanies his best friend Richard to El Salvador to try to find Richard's

CRITIQUE:So Little BlackIs literary or post-modern fiction a white thing?Are there only white characters?Do black lives matter in the world of make-believe?Percival Everett makes you acutely aware of these issues.On page 8, the painter protagonist, Kevin Pace, finds himself "sitting next to a young woman with perhaps the whitest skin I had ever seen." What follows is an analysis of her whiteness. Soon, "the backs of our hands grazed." Readers suffer from an element of complicity and guilt, becau...

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...

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

This story about a middle-aged artist reckoning with his past takes us through three formative periods in his life.In 1979, Kevin accompanies his best friend Richard to El Salvador to search for Richard’s brother in the increasingly dangerous country. While there, he has a life-altering experience that haunts him from that point forward.After coming home from El Salvador, Kevin marries Linda, a woman whom he likes but doesn’t love, desperate for a sense of security and normalcy. Years later, he

So Much Blue is comprised of three scenarios - a trip to the chaos of El Salvador in 1979, searching for a good friend's brother; Paris some 25 years later, where the narrator is having an affair with a woman 25 years younger than he; and scenes which occur within the narrator's family in New England. Each of these scenarios is serious and intense in its own way, each contains secrets, and the fact that Mr. Everett is able to create those intensities and sustain them is proof once again that he

Kevin Pace is an abstract painter, of some fame, married with two children. He's a good, but not un-flawed, man. He's in a kind of existential morass, but not because of an ongoing crisis. Rather, there were two life-defining moments gnawing at him, one ten years ago, one thirty years ago.So, this novel, in short, revolving chapters, takes us from the present who am I?, to an affair with a much younger Parisian watercolorist, to a reckless few days in El Salvador to retrieve a friend's brother.

What makes a masterpiece? In a career as prolific, eclectic and adventurous as Percival Everett's, his body of work the very definition of singularity, it may even be foolish to hint one book is superior to another. And while it might be brazen to assert So Much Blue may be that magnum opus, it is an accusation i gleefully declare. A blissfully precise pen firmly draws the reader into the life of Kevin Pace in his quest for absolution and closure and the novel's three timelines kept deftly aloft...

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.

This novel addresses how difficult to define, and how elusive, are both love and colors. Following stories from three different episodes in the narrator's life, it also makes the case that it is possible for men to grow up even after they hit 50, which perhaps explains some of my enthusiasm. But there is also the fact that this novel offers some thought-provoking inquiry alongside absolutely gripping drama, and comedy. And Everett is just brilliant at cliche avoidance. I can't resist his prose.

Beautiful novel dealing with topics I would not normally be drawn to (art) or sympathetic toward (middle aged guy having an affair). But it's so well crafted and Everett has such compassion for his characters that I was with him every step of the way.