Whether on the beach or in your bed, catch up on five of the best art novels published this past year. As it happens, all five center on how art emerges through relationships—with friends, mentors, parents, and lovers, and with artists from the past.
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Transcription
By Ben Lerner
Only Ben Lerner can turn anxious, overthinking, self-deprecating inner monologues into moving and tender tales so effectively, so consistently. Transcription starts as a detailed day of navigating the world without a phone. Our narrator has dropped his into the sink (and not the toilet!), but he’s supposed to be interviewing his mentor for a magazine. Visiting that mentor’s intimidating, impressive art-filled house, he finds he’s too embarrassed to confess his clumsy mistake. So he arrives without a recording device and gets caught in an elaborate workaround, acting childish. His humiliating flop is outed at a Museo Reina Sofia dinner, and as the story unfolds, parent-child and mentor-mentee relationships of all kinds blur. It’s a portrait of a world where adulthood—where having “figured it out”—is increasingly understood as a myth.
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Discipline
By Larissa Pham
Larissa Pham’s first novel is a moving tale of mentorship after #MeToo. A woman artist and her male teacher embark on a complicated relationship here portrayed unflinchingly and in all its complexity. The teacher’s approval has an outsize impact on our young protagonist. Haunted by the suspicion that her professional success could be attributed to her famous teacher’s sexual attraction to her rather than her own talent, she eventually gives up painting altogether and writes a novel imagining feminist revenge—his death. But off on book tour, she finds the book doesn’t quite provide the catharsis she’d hoped for. Then, he reads it.
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My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fiction
By Deborah Levy
A writer, living in Paris, is stumped by an assignment—an essay on Gertrude Stein. Soon she finds herself imagining, as she goes about her daily life, what Stein would think about this or that—about her friend’s missing cat, another friend’s three lovers. It’s as if they are conversing in the narrator’s head. Then, as she reflects on how the lesbian icon of modernism broke down language, Deborah Levy’s own prose takes on memorable experimental form. In the hands of a master of her craft—a true successor to Stein—the voices of the narrator and her subject merge into one. You are what you read.
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Lonely Crowds
By Stephanie Wambugu
Stephanie Wambugu’s debut novel follows two childhood friends as they grow up together, choosing the same college (Bard) and embarking on lives as artists in New York City. Arriving on the scene at a moment when Black figurative painting is ascendant, they both navigate the expectations this trend puts upon them in their own ways. It’s a tale of two artist archetypes that here are codependent: Maria is troubled but gregarious; Ruth is introverted and contemplative. And it is Ruth who serves as the steady-eyed narrator of this story of nature versus nurture. She candidly analyzes a friendship at once toxic and tender, steady and chaotic, familial-feeling and erotically charged.
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Kill Dick
By Luke Goebel
Imagine a novel written in the style of Vice magazine. That’s Kill Dick, Luke Goebel’s debut. This unhinged work of bicoastal art world satire imagines Sackler family revenge from the vantage of an NYU art school dropout who hates her dad—the lawyer for Dick Sickler (a thinly veiled Sackler patriarch) personally responsible for helping the opioid dealer get away with mass murder. How does a rich girl rebel against a dad like that? By getting addicted to OxyContin, naturally—and creating a transgressive public art installation that puts the Sicklers to shame. This one’s for fans of Luigi Mangione and Nan Goldin, and maybe also Ottessa Moshfegh—Goebel’s wife.
