In the background of this slow surrender looms the election of Donald Trump – “our mad leader,” Fields calls him. Maksik convincingly captures the posthumous feeling of New York after the 2016 election, at least among many in the media class; he opens the book in “that grim season, in that terrible year, in our sad city.” It is an age of meditation apps and ubiquitous sanctity, of a lifting of the distinctions between art, advertising and activism. In this swamp comes an invitation for Fields to observe and write about an enigmatic, possibly sinister artists’ colony called the Coded Garden, a place, the patron repeatedly emphasizes, “for beauty.” The location is intentionally obscured from the reader (although it’s worth noting that Maksik is co-director of a green literary residence in Catalonia).
In one of his own profiles, of the novelist James Salter, Maksik has written about joking with a friend about starting a movement called the “Sensualist School” after Salter’s influence, in response to those “slippery and self-referential writers who seemed happy disconnected from physical experience, guided by the idea that thinking, not feeling, was the way to art.” His previous two novels, ‘A Marker to Measure Drift’ and the prescient title ‘Shelter in Place’, seemed to fulfill this ambition, with protagonists for whom experience was a fuzzy and unrelenting thing; these were lost people, haunted by memories, adrift in their shattered mental states, and Maksik’s prose was at all times appropriately tuned to the phenomenological.
In this regard, “The Long Corner” marks a departure. The novel is more concerned with storytelling than with “physical experience” as such, and the story it tells revolves around questions of creativity, grief, and the destruction of Trump-era platitudes and the ever-increasing improbability and absurdism. Fortunately, Maksik evades the polemical fable that people fear he is writing in favor of a much more exciting project. “You should never fall for the myth of the absolute villain,” Fields’ grandmother warns him. And even as the colony’s shadowy visionary, Sebastian Light (sometimes reminiscent of Marlon Brando’s Dr. Moreau), he takes on certain Trumpian traits: his distaste for “elites,” his allegiance to kitsch, his willingness to to burn to control the story – Maksik never makes the novel seem overly programmatic. It is finally an argument for the necessity of irony, risk and integrity in the production of art as in life.
Given his complicity in a culture he finds demeaning, Fields admits he fears he is “one of those people who are brave only in youth”. In the course of the novel’s tropical intrigues, sweat lodge sex rituals, betrayals and fireworks, he comes to realize that he can still pursue art, that his writing can be deepened by experience, rather than by it. are discounted. He just has to decide. In Maksik’s profile, Salter tells him, “If I make an argument, which is only implied anyway, it’s try to be a man.” That’s enough, he seems to say, just to try.
