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 CornerRead Full Review >>
Solomon Fields is a man divided: he has an artistic soul nurtured by his free-spirited grandmother that once brought him into the world of art journalism, but also a pragmatic brain cultivated by his Marxist-turned-neocon mother, which later landed him in the superficial, yet financially rewarding, world of New York advertising...When a mysterious woman approaches him with an ambiguous writing opportunity that might rekindle his artistic leanings, he resists at first...But as his life becomes less satisfying, he agrees to visit The Coded Garden, a sort of artists’ colony overseen by a wealthy svengali...The very question of what it means for Solomon to be Jewish is a debate between two opposing positions: his mother says they’re 'secular Jews,' while his father calls them 'historical Jews'...Jews are a race, or maybe they aren’t...Jews are white, or maybe they aren’t...It’s a question of heritage, or maybe it’s merely a disposition, as his father says: 'That you even want to know what makes you a Jew makes you a Jew'...Ultimately, it’s the duality within Solomon that matters most...Even as Sebastian Light, the enigmatic, pseudonymous creator of The Coded Garden — 'a handsome man, a readymade guru'— refuses to answer the most basic questions about his own life, he challenges Solomon to define himself...Is he part of the artistic world, or part of its shadowy nemesis, as Light sees it: 'New Yorkers. The media. The elites. The elect few making decisions about who gets attention, what is and is not quality, what is beauty and what is not'...In the end, figuring out his own position is Solomon’s only way off this island — metaphorically and literally.
Maksik has set his sights on the vanity of the most self-absorbed corners of the art world, but it doesn’t change the fact that in his assessment there’s nothing behind the curtain, which leaves the book feeling somewhat hollow. Even the Disney-diehard will find fault in Light’s argument that art 'must soothe, its message must be kind, it must, as beauty itself does, shelter and secure us.' For my money, there’s no true Scotsman in the novel, as every character is living some sort of fantasy of their own making, even the archetypal sculptor. And the question of whether or not Solomon’s grandmother’s life and death could be seen as a form of art in spite of her lack of creative output is sort of a milquetoast question to ask 50 years after the death of Mishima. Sol for his part is no Ishmael—anyone who claims 'There’s nothing shocking left' simply isn’t looking. So where does that leave us with The Long Corner‘s assessment of art or the artist? Perhaps it’s my own cynicism, but it’s hard not to read The Long Corner in that way.
Maksik’s scathing satire sets its sights on a pretentious art colony...Solomon Fields, a journalist turned copywriter in the 'dusk' of his 30s, abandons his successful Manhattan career after an emissary from an Edenic experimental settlement called the Coded Garden approaches him at a party with an invitation to visit...It’s 2017, and the nightmare of Trump’s new world has made him vulnerable to the pitch...There, on a remote island, he’s overcome by the scents of jasmine, frangipani, eucalyptus, and citrus trees, and learns more about the founder, Sebastian Light, who insists on his guests’ absolute devotion to their work...Solomon is put through a humiliating regimen of sexual healing in a sauna and attends an art exhibition where the work of other guests is given ruthless judgments...In the balance, Solomon, who was raised by a Marxist mother and a hedonistic grandmother who survived the Holocaust, recognizes the haunting irony of the slogan stamped on the metal entrance gates to the camp, which reads 'beauty will set you free'...Readers will revel in the riotous upending of a self-absorbed personality.
