THE WHOLE ART THING

by Justin Spring ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 1986

Callow youth at play, or What I Did On My Summer Vacation: a listless, conventionally sensitive first novel about a college student's forays into the Manhattan art world. James Sloan is a romantically melancholic art student at Amherst who is depressed because his favorite teacher, painter Dick Merisi, has committed suicide--driven to it by never-specified pressures. When James receives a summer fellowship in studio art, he immediately heads: for New York, where (after a brief stay with his horrible mother) he moves in with wealthy fellow student, Gillaume Brix-Webber. After this, James joins the Art Student's League, works at his printmaking, listens to lectures on proletarian art from the ambitious, dilettantish Gillaume, and has--in his increasingly tiresome innocence--simply marvelous adventures with bag ladies, drunken street-musicians, etc. His Big Scene comes when he finally learns that Gillaume has cynically made a killing by helping an important art dealer corner the market on the late Merisi's paintings; James bawls out his former friend in a downtown club (risking eternal perdition and banishment from the art scene) and heads back to Amherst, not ready--not just yet, thank you--to face the cold, cruel real world. A collegiate novel with a strongly autobiographical feel (one senses, in certain rather gratuitous portrayals, old scores being settled) that fails to survive an over-dependence on the meager driving power of its main character's earnestly principled high tone. But Spring has talent, can write with humor, and may produce an interesting novel, once he settles out of his youthful material.

Pub Date: Feb. 18, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1986

Categories: FICTION