INTONA

The artists in residence at an art institute have stories to tell in O’Brien’s novel.

At the Intona Institute of Art, students discover a painting by a Renaissance artist named Amadeo Verga. One of the students, Niev, is a scholar of Amadeo and recounts his story: Amadeo got his start as a glass artist but didn’t much care for the medium. He went to work for a nobleman who gave him the opportunity to paint his daughter, Lady Louise. Amadeo and Lady Louise had an affair, but Lady Louise married another noble and Amadeo went on to have a career as an artist. Niev shows the unnamed narrator, his childhood friend, around Intona and introduces him to Paul, a French painter. They also meet an architect named Jonas Monfleur, who tells them a story about the ancient civilization of Athzuria, which practiced something called “death by information”—criminals were tortured by being kept awake as someone read to them. The narrator goes home to his family, and the narrative’s point-of-view then shifts to some of the other characters: Niev’s girlfriend, a Chinese sculptor, may be deported; Intona’s privileged owner goes to a brothel and is talked into an AI-assisted sexual experiment that ultimately results in a lawsuit that may force him to sell the Institute; Paul meets his father’s fiancé. None of it really hangs together—the novel is bogged down in extraneous details, sidebars, and tangents rendering it unfocused and hard to follow. It’s not really clear how all of the stories Niev and the others at Intona tell connect, or if they are even supposed to, aside from Paul possibly being a descendant of the noble family that employed Amadeo. Some of the individual stories are engaging, but they feel disconnected and a little pretentious, and the prose is just this side of purple (“and now she was crying as I brought her into me, and embraced her, and she embraced me back, and I said, ‘I need you . . . there’s no one else I need, d’you hear me? I’ll die without you . . .’”).

A disconnected look at a rarified world.