The Challenge of Making Art in a Culture That Cheaps It

Behind this slow surrender comes the election of Donald Trump, whom Fields calls “our mad leader.” Maksik convincingly captures the posthumous feeling of New York in the wake of the 2016 election, at least among many in the media class; opens the book “in that terrible season, in that terrible year, in our sad city”. It is an era of meditative practices and pervasive holiness, where distinctions between art, advertising, and activism have disappeared. Inside this swamp comes an invitation to observe and write about the Fields, a mysterious, possibly sinister, artists’ colony called the Coded Garden. Its location is deliberately confused for the reader (though it is worth noting that Maksik is the assistant director of a lush literary residence in Catalonia).

In one of the novelist James Salter’s own profiles, Maksik wrote that he was joking with a friend about starting a movement called the “Sensualist School” under Salter’s influence. detached from bodily experience, guided by the idea that the way to art is not emotion but thought. His two previous novels, “A Marker to Measure Drift” and presciently titled “Shelter Onsite” seemed to live with this ambition, involving protagonists for whom experience is something hazy and implacable; these were lost people, haunted by memory, rambling in their fragmented mental states, and Maksik’s prose always appropriately harmonized with the phenomenological.

In this respect, the “Long Corner” marks a divergence. The novel is more concerned with storytelling than “bodily experience,” and its story revolves around creativity, grief, and the breaking of Trump-era stereotypes and the ever-increasing irrationality and absurdity. Fortunately, Maksik eschews the polemic tale, worrying that he’s writing in favor of a much more compelling project. “You should never be fooled by the absolute villain myth,” Fields’ grandmother warns. And Sebastian Light, the colony’s dark visionary (sometimes reminiscent of Marlon Brando’s Dr. Moreau), takes on some of Trump’s traits – his “resentment towards the elite”, his devotion to kitsch, his willingness to destroy everything. check the narrative – Maksik never lets the novel seem overly programmatic. Finally, it is an argument for the necessity of irony, risk and integrity in art production as in life.

Considering his complicity in a culture he finds humiliating, Fields admits he fears he might be “just one of those people who was brave in their youth.” Through the novel’s tropical intrigues, sweating sex rituals, betrayals, and pyrotechnics, he realizes that he can still aspire to art, that his writings can deepen rather than cheapen with experience. He just has to decide. “Somehow, if I make any implicit argument, it’s this: try to be a man,” Salter tells him in Maksik’s profile. That seems to be enough, he says, just to try.