An impressive, daringly conceptual novel set in the world of conceptual art.
A famous artist suffers an artistic crisis in Harper’s latest literary novel.
Pablo Navarre is a perfectionist. The celebrity artist refuses to unveil work that isn’t ready and is willing to scrap massive—and expensive—pieces even as his next big show is only months away. He wasn’t always so precious. Over a decade ago, he was a scruffy young punk taking the New York art world by storm. Now he’s a calculating grouch in Versace glasses. Stymied by his latest sculpture—a massive hunk of Carrara marble that’s supposed to personify “capital-C Creation”—Pablo reflects on his past work and wonders if perhaps he’s lost his identity as an artist. While out drinking one night with one of his buyers, he runs into a homeless man, Bao Qi, who makes grotesque smiling faces out of beer cans. As soon as he sees them, Pablo knows he has the idea for his show. “The importance of hyperproductivity in the modern age,” he explains to his horrified manager. “Needing to churn out something just to keep everyone else satisfied. Well, this is what they get—if they can’t wait for perfection, then I will give them the most imperfect pieces imaginable.” Pablo assumes the beer-can show will be a bomb, just the sort of career implosion that will free him from the gilded cage he has constructed for himself. Of course, his plan backfires: The show is a massive hit with both critics and buyers, heralded as the beginning of a new phase for his singular genius! Now Pablo truly has no idea what to think or what to be. He is sent on a spiraling, self-destructive journey through the streets and substances of New York City, risking his career, wealth, and marriage in an attempt to understand the cryptic wisdom of Bao Qi: Happiness is all around you.
The art world is an evergreen object of satire, and Harper’s barbs land on many familiar targets—the pretension of artists, the cynicism of buyers, the self-delusion of critics, the gullibility of the public. “Tate Bevan inspires me about as much as Bazooka Joe,” gripes Pablo in one of several tirades against his contemporaries (in this case, an artist who blindfolds visitors to his show so that they can “manifest” the art on their own). “He may have a lot of buzz right now, but only until the next stuntman comes along.” Pablo is no less pretentious, cynical, or self-delusional. His rebellion against his industry comes across as petulant, his journey of self-discovery as self-indulgent. That isn’t necessarily a problem for the novel. Pablo’s anxiety that everyone around him is a fraud (and that he might be one too) gets at something inherent to the art-making process, and it’s compelling to watch Harper grapple with these ideas against the lovingly caricatured world of New York art. In a move straight from Pablo’s playbook, Harper plans to update the novel regularly going forward, slowly altering its form like the eponymous vessel and perhaps eventually rendering this review obsolete. Whether readers will feel compelled to revisit the work in future iterations is perhaps beside the point: As Pablo claims late in the novel, “It’s ephemerality that begets immortality; constant change…keeps the subject alive!”
An impressive, daringly conceptual novel set in the world of conceptual art.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2025
ISBN: 9798218692810
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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