So Much Blue by Percival Everett

Normally, I end a holiday (a “vacation” for my American readers) in a downbeat mood.

I return from whatever beautiful, charming, (usually much warmer) place I’ve been visiting back to ugly, grey, (usually much colder) London, with sadness rising as the plane meanders through the sky.

Why, why, why, I ask, am I even bothering to go home? Why not leap out of the plane at its apex into the blue (or muddy green) beneath? Why stay alive, when every second the plane flies is another second I’m closer to somewhere I don’t want to be?

To clarify, I’m asking in an intellectual way, not a suicidal one. No active suicidal thoughts, readers, but plenty of day-to-day apathy.

Yes, I really need to relocate, it’s true, but that won’t be happening any time soon (and that’s fine, I have gone through all the grief stages and reached acceptance), so it’s very very very very very very important that, instead of misery, I find moments of joy in life. In transcendent pleasure and cultural communion. Yes.

I didn’t spend my last flight home from a holiday hoping for an engine failure, this time, though, no. I instead spent that most recent flight reading one of the most widely enjoyable novels I’ve encountered for a long time.

Yes, I’ve read several great books that are fun and action packed recently, I’ve read several more that are sad and serious and deeply moving, and I’ve also read several books that are raucously funny. But what I haven’t encountered, not for a very long time, is something that manages to do what So Much Blue does, which is – in under 250 pages – do absolutely fucking everything a novel is able to do.

I laughed at this novel, over and over and over again. I wept at and with it, repeatedly, too. I was excited and moved and engaged and just, fucking, awed.

This is a novel that is able to be exciting, to be romantic, to be funny, to be philosophical, to be serious, to be silly, to be playful, to be sexy, to be be be be be…

It’s about art and it’s about civil war and it’s about friendship and about romance and about parenting and about marriage and about travel and about ageing and about creativity and seeking purpose, seeking privacy, seeking self and seeking others… It’s about the creative urge, the adventurous urge…

It’s about regret and shame, but also too about the things we don’t regret and aren’t ashamed by yet feel unsettled by this understanding…

It’s witty and cheeky, but it’s also deadly fucking serious.

It’s about grief, in places, about joy, in others, about sex and love and the intersections and differences and overlaps and mismatches of the two…

–///–

It’s a three-strand novel telling narratives about the life of Kevin Pace, an acclaimed painter (the visual artist type) in his 50s (in the framing, latest, narrative), who is creating a painting he wants no one else to ever see, including after his death.

He explores methods of automated canvas destruction while navigating a family crisis, reflecting on the present and on the past…

We also see two other key episodes of his life: the time he had an affair with a younger student watercolourist in Paris about ten years before and – 20 years before that – the time he and a college friend went to El Salvador as the country collapsed into civil war looking out for the friend’s brother who had fallen/walked off the map down that way…

And it’s fucking brilliant.

I could quote from the book, I could tell you what happens, I could photograph pages of Everett’s slick prose and encourage you to read it at length here…

But don’t do that. Don’t be like me.

If you haven’t read any works by the widely-acclaimed author Percival Everett before – which I, stupidly, hadn’t – then go and pick some up and read it now.

I’d previously seen American Fiction, the 2023 Cord Jefferson adaptation of Everett’s novel Erasure, which I’d absolutely loved, and I have been meaning to read some Everett ever since…

What happened, though, was I became overwhelmed by the amount of choice…

Everett is a contemporary novelist who writes at a mid-century novelist rate, i.e. he’s published almost 30 novels, as well several collections of poetry and short stories. He’s prolific. So where does one start? How does one start??

Well, I ended up starting here. And I certainly won’t be ending here.

An absolute fucking powerhouse of literary pleasure from the first page through to the last. I laughed like a pig, I cried like a pig, I was tense and excited like a tense and excited pig. Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes.

If every book I read can be as good as this, maybe I’d never have to feel like I’m just wasting time every again. Every day’s a holiday, if there’s time in a commute or at the end of the day to squeeze something like this in… Really fucking good stuff.

A masterpiece. Go read it. Now!