Tuesday Nights in 1980
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2016 CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE
A dazzling literary debut about three lives colliding in 80s downtown New York
On the eve of 1980, downtown New York is the centre of the universe. Here are the artistes and the socialites, the dealers, collectors, bartenders, freaks, party-goers and hangers-on-all looking to make it in the big city, teetering on the brink of selling out, searching for something to save them.
Among them is painter Raul Engales, in exile from Argentina's Dirty War and his own past. Fresh on the downtown scene and posing as an art student, he has just caught the eye of New York's most infamous art critic: James Bennett.
James has synaesthesia, experiencing life and art in wild, magical ways. He sees pictures as starbursts and fireworks, smells citrus when he says 'mother', and hears songs when he looks at sculptures. Art is James' gateway to endless new sensations, the secret to his success. In this city, his name is a byword for good taste - until the day his gift deserts him.
And then there's Lucy: Raul's eager blonde muse. Newly escaped from the suburban nothingness of Idaho, impossibly young and still untouched by urban ennui, she is drawn like a firefly to the electric brilliance of the city-and especially to its artists...
Over the course of one year, these three lives collide and remake each other. A brand new decade has just begun and New York is a crucible brimming with the energy of a million secret metamorphoses, poised to spill forth art, destruction and life itself into the waiting world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First-time novelist Prentiss vividly conjures a colorful love triangle set in the gritty, art-soaked world of downtown New York in 1980. Raul Engales is a painter throwing himself into the scene as a means to escape his past in Argentina, where war has cast everything into shadow. James Bennett is an up-and-coming art critic with an overwhelming gift: synesthesia: "an image was manufactured into a bodily sensation... applesauce tasted like sadness and winter was the color blue." The fulcrum is Lucy Olliason, a naive beauty from Idaho, drawn to New York by a postcard of the skyline she found on the side of the road. Prentiss shines when showing us James's powers of perception. Impressive, too, is her ability to create an atmosphere that crackles with possibility as well as foreboding. She sprinkles verisimilitude throughout the SoHo scene Laurie Anderson sings at a party at Raul's squat; Lucy spies Keith Haring tagging a subway station; news of "Jean-Michel" and his neologistic SAMO tags are everywhere and nowhere, a spectral presence imprinting on Raul's psyche. Structured over a year beset by tragedy, the story belongs to the two great men, artist and critic; Lucy's beauty is her most distinguishing characteristic. One yearns for more time spent on the women artists who are minor characters, James's magnanimous wife, Marge, and Lucy's sometime roommate. Nevertheless, this is a bold and auspicious debut.
