The Challenge of Making Art in a Culture That Cheapens It

Looming within the background of this sluggish give up is the election of Donald Trump — “our lunatic chief,” Fields calls him. Maksik convincingly captures New York’s posthumous feeling following the 2016 election, not less than amongst many within the media class; he opens the e-book in “that grim season, in that horrible yr, in our unhappy metropolis.” It’s an period of meditation apps and pervasive sanctimony, of a dissolution of the distinctions between artwork, promoting and activism. Into this morass arrives an invite for Fields to watch and write about an enigmatic, probably sinister artists’ colony referred to as the Coded Backyard, a spot, its patron insists repeatedly, “for magnificence.” Its location is intentionally obfuscated for the reader (although it’s value noting Maksik is a co-director of a verdant literary residency in Catalonia).

In considered one of his personal profiles, of the novelist James Salter, Maksik has written of joking with a good friend about beginning a motion referred to as the “Sensualist College” following Salter’s affect, as a response to these “glib and self-referential writers who appeared fortunately disconnected from bodily expertise, guided by the notion that thought, not feeling, was the way in which into artwork.” His earlier two novels, “A Marker to Measure Drift” and the presciently titled “Shelter in Place,” appeared to reside as much as this ambition, that includes protagonists for whom expertise was a hazy and unrelenting factor; these had been misplaced individuals, memory-haunted, adrift of their shattered psychological states, and Maksik’s prose was appropriately attuned always to the phenomenological.

On this respect, “The Lengthy Nook” marks a departure. The novel is extra involved with storytelling than with “bodily expertise” as such, and the story it tells orbits round questions of creativity, grief and the Trump period’s demolition of platitudes and ever-escalating implausibility and absurdism. Maksik thankfully sidesteps the polemical fable one worries he is perhaps writing in favor of a way more compelling mission. “You should by no means fall for the parable of absolutely the villain,” Fields’s grandmother warns him. And even because the colony’s shadowy visionary, Sebastian Gentle (who at occasions reminds considered one of Marlon Brando’s Dr. Moreau), takes on sure Trumpian qualities — his resentment of “elites,” his allegiance to kitsch, his willingness to burn all of it down to regulate the narrative — Maksik by no means permits the novel to appear overly programmatic. It’s lastly an argument for the need of irony, threat and integrity within the manufacturing of artwork as in life.

Contemplating his complicity in a tradition he finds degrading, Fields admits to a concern that he is perhaps “a type of individuals courageous solely in youth.” Over the course of the novel’s tropical intrigue, sweat-lodge intercourse rituals, betrayals and pyrotechnics, he involves an understanding that he can nonetheless aspire to artwork, that his writing can develop into deepened by expertise, moderately than cheapened by it. He solely has to resolve. In Maksik’s profile, Salter tells him, “If I make any argument, which is anyhow solely implicit, it’s: Attempt to be a person.” That’s sufficient, he appears to say, simply to attempt.