The Long Corner
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3.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A bold novel about ambition, grief, creativity, beauty, and existential emptiness that retraces the arc of American life and culture in the first decades of the 21st century.
It is early 2017 in New York City, Donald Trump is President, and Solomon Fields, a young Jewish journalist-turned-advertising hack, finds himself disillusioned by the hollowness and conformity of American life and language. Once brimming with dreams and ideals instilled in him by his eternally bohemian grandmother, a survivor of the Holocaust who has dedicated her life to passion and pleasure, Sol now finds the senseless jargon he produces at work seeping into all aspects of the world around him—and most disturbingly, into the art that his beloved grandmother taught him to revere.
A personal tragedy drives Sol to leave New York and accept an invitation to The Coded Garden, an artists’ colony on a tropical island, whose mysterious patron, Sebastian Light, seems to offer the very escape Sol desperately needs. But the longer he remains in the Garden, the more Light comes to resemble Trump himself, and the games he plays with Sol become more dangerous. Slowly lines begin to blur—between reality and performance, sincerity and manipulation, art and life, beauty and emptiness—until Sol finds that he must question everything: his past, his convictions, and his very sanity.
“Alexander Maksik is a sorcerer of the first order."—Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Maksik's scathing satire (after Shelter in Place) sets its sights on a pretentious art colony. Solomon Fields, a journalist turned copywriter in the "dusk" of his 30s, abandons his successful Manhattan career after an emissary from an Edenic experimental settlement called the Coded Garden approaches him at a party with an invitation to visit. It's 2017, and the nightmare of Trump's new world has made him vulnerable to the pitch. There, on a remote island, he's overcome by the scents of jasmine, frangipani, eucalyptus, and citrus trees, and learns more about the founder, Sebastian Light, who insists on his guests' absolute devotion to their work (otherwise "you are a fraud," explains "apprentice" Siddhartha). Solomon is put through a humiliating regimen of sexual healing in a sauna and attends an art exhibition where the work of other guests is given ruthless judgments. It all leads to an incendiary conclusion that exposes the shocking cataclysmic consequences of Light's "benevolent dictatorship," which turns out to have strangely Trumpian overtones. In the balance, Solomon, who was raised by a Marxist mother and a hedonistic grandmother who survived the Holocaust, recognizes the haunting irony of the slogan stamped on the metal entrance gates to the camp, which reads "beauty will set you free." Readers will revel in the riotous upending of a self-absorbed personality.
