Nightshade
A novel
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1.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A lean, taut novel about an artist—a painter—at the height of her career, about the art world, about love, fidelity, fame, betrayal, and the large choices and prices paid in the quest for art for art's sake. By the much-admired author of The Spoiler ("cutting wit and razor-sharp writing"—NYTBR; "a dark, sparkly gem of a book"—Christopher Buckley) and Hame ("I couldn't put it down"—Patrick McGrath).
Eve Laing, celebrated artist, once the muse of legendary painter and "monstre sacré" Florian Kiš, is a photorealist painter of flowers at the peak of her career, with her work in international galleries and museums.
Now Eve is embarking on her most ambitious work to date—seven enormous, elaborate panels of the world's deadliest plants. In psychic preparation, she has taken a wrecking ball to her opulent high-wire life, jettisoning her marriage for a beautiful young lover, a drifter half her age, who seems to share her single-minded artistic vision. As the novel opens out, Eve is on a late-night walk through London, setting out from her former family home in the well-heeled west of the city, back to her studio, a converted factory in the grittier east, where her recently completed masterpiece hangs and where a fatal reckoning may await. . . . Eve makes her way through the city and reflects on her life today and as it was years ago, and considers the large choices she has made and their repercussions. As she walks, she summons up her wild art college days in London; her New York years as a tyro artist; her vicious rivalry with her college roommate, now a celebrated figure on the international conceptual art scene whose full-blown success and recognition still infuriates and rankles Eve's sense of rightness with the world. And as she weighs what's been gained and what's been lost in pursuit of her art, a sense of dread settles over her, one she cannot shake, and as Nightshade moves to its dark, shocking end, it explores large questions--about ambition . . . artistic truth . . . betrayal . . . about bad people making good art . . . about the consequences of fame . . . and the devastating price of love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McAfee (Hame) centers her caustically entertaining latest on Eve, a self-aggrandizing middle-aged antiheroine obsessed with her thwarted artistic vision. Eve's story begins at the garden of her former home and unfolds on her peripatetic journey through London's unfriendly streets. The trip allows Eve to consider her ambition to be more than a "flower painter," a status gained through the two works for which she is best known: Girl with a Flower, a famous portrait featuring Eve as a youthful, submissive muse, and Underground Florilegium, Eve's "first major work... much reproduced, copied, and pirated." Now, at 60 years old, Eve acidly recollects the obstacles to her artistry exploitative friends and fellow artists, callous reviewers to whom she is mere "ape of nature," a famous husband, an insipid daughter, a disloyal assistant, a visionless agent. She also ruminates on Poison Florilegium, a painting she wishes to compose that would be "monumental in scale" and depict flowering Swiss meadows where Alpine flowers are replaced with "the deadliest plants." This, "nature's most vicious prank," would, Eve believes, redeem her and, by proxy, all of history's thwarted and overlooked women artists. The painting becomes Eve's singular, myopic focus, reawakening her passions but blinding her to the machinations of those around her. Eve's obsessive self-absorption and ambition make this a pleasing investigation of the limits of artistic influence.
