The Long Corner

The novel is more concerned with storytelling than with 'bodily experience' as such, and the story it tells orbits around questions of creativity, grief and the Trump era’s demolition of platitudes and ever-escalating implausibility and absurdism...Maksik fortunately sidesteps the polemical fable one worries he might be writing in favor of a much more compelling project...'You must never fall for the myth of the absolute villain,' Fields’s grandmother warns him...And even as the colony’s shadowy visionary, Sebastian Light (who at times reminds one of Marlon Brando’s Dr. Moreau), takes on certain Trumpian qualities — his resentment of 'elites,' his allegiance to kitsch, his willingness to burn it all down to control the narrative — Maksik never allows the novel to seem overly programmatic...It is finally an argument for the necessity of irony, risk and integrity in the production of art as in life.

Alexander Maksik’s new novel The Long Corner skillfully explores the intersections of capitalism and dictatorship, cliché and originality, art and life...By the end, the reader is left to question if these things are opposites at all, or if they are more entwined than we ever imagined...Filled with colorful characters, dry humor and unsettling situations, The Long Corner is a Rorshach test for a reader’s own views on government, nobility and the self...Much like the paintings Sol experiences in the book, the longer you look, the more you learn about the chaotic yet familiar world Maksik has built here...As heavy as the topics are, I cannot overstate how funny this book is...Maksik has found the key to an effective thought-provoker: Don’t let them go too long without cracking a smile...Through Sol’s dry commentary on the absurdity happening around him, we are able to find light in the very dark pockets Maksik allows us to peek into...And frankly, it’s necessary...A less talented writer would have emitted the humor so as not to distract from the point, but in novels as in life, we must find something good to break up the cruelty and randomness.

A secular, urban, atheist Jew living in modern-day New York, Sol Fields, the narrator of Alexander Maksik’s fourth novel,The Long Corner, learned a similar lesson from his father: to be Jewish is to be 'scrappy, funny, depressed, anxious, worried, nervous, tough, nuts, smart'...Maksik’s novel is the story of what happens when a kvetcher encounters kitsch...The voices of Sol’s favorite women, his grandmother and his mother, haunt him throughout the novel...The former, a Holocaust survivor, is a bright, brash, and bawdy figure who urges her grandson to pursue pleasure above all else. 'There are three true sins,' she declares: 'Utilitarianism, snobbery, and orthodoxy'...Wary of self-indulgence, through art or any other opiate, Sol’s mother, by contrast, insists that 'Whatever you do, it’s got to be for more than yourself'...The quarrel between these two women reenacts the ancient tension between the id and the super ego...Like the true nature The Coded Garden, that battle is never settled...Instead, it's another of the unresolved conflicts that elevate The Long Corner Read Full Review >>