“So Much Blue“ by Percival Everett - review

 “So Much Blue” by Percival Everett:

“A painting has many surfaces.” And so has this novel which is by turns shocking, funny and touching.

Kevin Pace, a 56-years-old abstract painter lives in an artsy, idyllic home in New England, together with his loving wife and his 2 kids and paints, among many others, over a long stretch of time one very personal, very intimate and secret painting he won’t allow anyone to see, not his children, not his best friend Richard, not even his wife, Linda. The painting might or might not be a representation of the quest in a frustrating life, a life that moves without moving, changes but hardly alters. The painting might also be just a symbol for a secret we never allow anyone else to see and how this takes a toll on us.

Is life similar to a painting in which things are really no more than tenebrous representations of tenebrous recollections of reality?

Kevin, in a dispassionate voice, tells of mostly past events. The novel is perfectly structured, there are really three novels in one. The narration shifts between three time lines, easily recognizable by their labels: 1979, Paris and House:

In a very thriller-like narrative, 30 years ago in Salvador in 1979, we follow Kevin on a dangerous and formative quest for the lost brother of his best friend Richard.

In a captivating love-story, some 12 years ago on a business trip in Paris, we watch Kevin, already a successful painter and married with 2 kids, falling in love with a young watercolorist.

In a piece of domestic fiction the present of Kevin unfolds at his home with his family and all the troubles of their own. 

As different in voice and mood these captions are, they all have one thing in common and that is Kevin. The three stages of his live slowly begin to coalesce and show, that the past and what we did, will for ever have an impact on our life and those we live with and that time and experience do have the power to alter us. Change is possible.

While still using his inimitable sense of deadpan humor and slapstick, his way of fast-paced entertaining narration, Percival Everett with So Much Blue delivers here one of his more somberly serious novels. It is in spirit closer related to Wounded and different but not less great, than his satires I Am Not Sidney Poitier and The Trees. My personal disposition connects more with the somberness, the lugubriousness and the gravity of it. 

This is an often frank and honest look into marriage, into fatherhood, into love, deception, self-deception and responsibility, into art, the mistakes we made in the past and how honesty and truth can be simultaneously crushing, destructive and hurtful but also redemptive. It is also about keeping secrets and the diabolical power they exert on us and on those close to us. 

So Much Blue is so far my favorite of Percival Everett’s books. 

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