So Much Blue, Percival Everett
So Much Blue, Percival Everett
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

So Much Blue

Author: Percival Everett

Narrator: Patrick Lawlor

Unabridged: 7 hr 44 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/13/2017


Synopsis

Kevin Pace is working on a painting that he won't allow anyone to see: not his children; not his best friend, Richard; not even his wife, Linda. The painting is a canvas of twelve feet by twenty-one feet (and three inches) that is covered entirely in shades of blue. It may be his masterpiece or it may not; he doesn’t know or, more accurately, doesn’t care.

What Kevin does care about are the events of the past. Ten years ago he had an affair with a young watercolorist in Paris. Kevin relates this event with a dispassionate air, even a bit of puzzlement. It's not clear to him why he had the affair, but he can't let it go. In the more distant past of the late seventies, Kevin and Richard traveled to El Salvador on the verge of war to retrieve Richard's drug-dealing brother, who had gone missing without explanation. As the events of the past intersect with the present, Kevin struggles to justify the sacrifices he's made for his art and the secrets he’s kept from his wife.

So Much Blue features Percival Everett at his best, and his deadpan humor and insightful commentary about the artistic life culminate in a brilliantly readable new novel.

About Percival Everett

Percival Everett is a literary shapeshifter, an author whose work defies genre and expectation. Born in 1956, he has carved out a career as one of America’s most daring and intellectually playful writers, blending satire, philosophy, and social critique across novels, short stories, and poetry. With a bibliography spanning dozens of books-including Erasure, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, and The Trees, a Pulitzer Prize finalist-Everett tackles race, identity, and the absurdities of modern life with razor-sharp wit and profound depth.

A professor of English at the University of Southern California, Everett is also an accomplished painter, musician, and horse trainer, embodying the restless curiosity that defines his fiction. His work, often compared to that of Ralph Ellison and Thomas Pynchon, resists easy categorization, making him one of contemporary literature’s most unpredictable and essential voices.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Betsy on October 22, 2017

When I finished the last page of this gorgeous novel, I held the paperback against my heart, rocked, cried, and moaned, "Oh." That's about all you need to know.......more

Goodreads review by Trish on February 01, 2018

Percival Everett blows the doors off with this beautifully constructed novel that holds secrets and mysteries in each of its three stories centered about Kevin, a fifty-something abstract painter living in New England with his wife and two children. I do wonder about Everett, who so gradually has be......more

Goodreads review by Carol on June 09, 2021

****4.5 Stars**** Kevin Pace, the narrator in this story, is a middle-aged painter, a married man with two children and more than a few secrets. The format is written in short chapters with three alternating headings spanning several decades: “House” for the present time; “Paris” approximately 10 yea......more

Goodreads review by Paul on April 15, 2025

So Much Blue is comprised of three scenarios - a trip to the chaos of El Salvador in 1979, searching for a good friend's brother; Paris some 25 years later, where the narrator is having an affair with a woman 25 years younger than he; and scenes which occur within the narrator's family in New Engla......more

Goodreads review by Lark on January 30, 2019

Every other Everett novel has been a 5 star memorably great read for me, but this one was a miss. The narrator struck me as self-indulgent rather than sincere. The novel is written as an interwoven story of three time frames in the narrator's life, titled "Paris," "House," and "1979." I flat-out disl......more