THE LOGOS

An artist’s modern-day Faustian bargain, rendered in granular detail.

De Silva’s second novel is narrated by a young New York painter on the rise who, as the (very lengthy) story opens, has recently lost his muse. His nuanced paintings of his now-ex have caught the eyes of wealthy collectors, but though he has acclaim, steady income is lacking. So a patron refers him to Garrett, an entrepreneur with very deep pockets who wants him to sketch ideas for some forthcoming products: glasses, whiskey, and an energy drink. The two subjects he’s assigned to observe for an ad campaign are Daphne, a rising art-film and off-Broadway actor, and Duke, an NFL rookie with massive talent but bad habits and rough friends back on Chicago’s South Side. The narrator puzzles over his new relationships with Garrett, Daphne, and Duke while pondering the Adderall-in-a-bottle qualities of the sports drink; sexual, physical, and existential drama ensues. Between its bulk, sober tone, and big themes, this novel is nakedly bidding to join the company of the postmodern titans who dominated late-20th-century American fiction: Gaddis, Gass, DeLillo, Wallace. And the book is capacious enough to fit some thoughtful philosophizing about the fuzzy line between art and money, what artists owe to the human beings they render (or is it exploit?), and the distinct virtues of writing and visual art. (The title is double-edged, referring to the ancient Greek word for word and ad symbols.) But it also has plodding, stodgy stretches where observations aren’t so much strikingly detailed as they are attenuated. (A passage where the narrator watches one of Duke’s college games runs 20 dense pages.) Tighter editing might have brought both de Silva’s intelligence and the tension of the narrator’s predicaments into sharper relief.

A hefty old-school social novel that nearly cracks under its own weight.