Book Review : Blake Butler - Alice Knott (2020)
There is no clear frame of reference to discuss Blake Butler. His novels twist and turn upon themselves like David Foster Wallace’s, but they couldn’t be any more different thematically. He’s hyperkinetic like Pierre Guyotat and yet thoroughly American. He is fascinating and difficult, like a vivid dream you’re struggling to remember once you wake up. Butler’s ideas are new and often terrifying, which makes him the de facto boogeyman of contemporary literature.
With his upcoming novel Alice Knott, Butler also reaffirms that he is our premier provider of cursed art.
Alice Knott begins with a video of the burning of Willem de Kooning’s painting Woman III, which is owned by our titular protagonist. Alice Knott is an art collector and the filthy rich heiress to a family fortune, living alone in an obscenely big house and slowly losing her mind. It is only the first of many classic works of art that are destroyed in this novel. The police investigation will quickly zero-in on Alice, tearing apart the fragile stasis she kept herself in.
There’s a lot of cover here.
First, let’s agree on something: Alice Knott is not exactly a neatly-wrapped police procedural that offers cookie-cutter insight on “the dark side of human psyche” or whatever. This is not what Blake Butler does. His novels work like an emotional prism: there’s something happening (the destruction of classic paintings), there’s a character assessing the events through her own troubled cognitive filter (Alice loses the linchpin that connects her to reality) and the audience reassesses everything through their own experience. It’s like a puzzle made out of puzzles.
The destruction of representation
The most haunting aspect of Alice Knott is the destruction of art. Starting with the de Kooning painting, people around the world start attacking painting in museums around the world. Punching them out. Slashing them with razors and whatnot. I know it sounds like the plot of an episode of Criminal Minds or whatever, but it works. This is not some hollow, psychopathic anarchist statement against bourgeois art. It would be boring and Blake Butler is anything but that.
Art is our representation of the world. It’s how we emotionally filter our reality. Whether it’s literally like Poussin or other classic painters destroyed in Alice Knott or figuratively to reflect the fragmentation of the self by modernity like de Kooning, art (and its evolution) is a witness to how we perceive the world. In case of Alice, it represents the entirety of her relationship to the world. She’s a reclusive heiress who lives alone. That’s why her mind collapses with the destruction of art.
Also, keep in mind that you’re also reading a work of art. Blake Butler has long been obsessed with the idea of annihilating reality in his work and it’s not a coincidence if the more paintings get destroyed, the more difficult Alice Knott becomes to read. The sentences become longer and less precise alongside Alice’s collapsing relationship to reality. It is perhaps the most convincingly Butler’s even explored the possibilities of such process.
It goes through rough patches, but doesn’t hit any dead ends.
That thing about the house
Blake Butler has a thing with houses in his work. Or should I say the idea of home. That your house should be a safe haven, shielding you from existential oppression. In his memoir of insomnia Nothing, the geometry of his own house is shifting. There’s some of that happening in Alice Knott. Size of rooms, colors of walls, things like that shift. She also finds a passageway from her house to parts unknown. Her own fucking fortress attacks her. It’s quite Cronenbergian. You might’ve seen more powerful symbols of a mental collapse, but I sure didn’t.
Alice’s house literally throws her out into the world like a mother giving birth. An oppressive, unintelligible world she’s helpless to decipher on her own. I love the idea of desacralizing the concept of birth conveyed by Alice Knott. That not every beginning is beautiful and full of possibilities. Anyone else less apt with language and creativity than Blake Butler would’ve messed it up. But he didn’t.
Going after one of the core ideas of Judeo-Christian values (that life is sacred) takes a lot of courage. Butler pulls if off with his trademark nuance and boundless imagination.
I really, really liked Alice Knott. Obviously, it’s not a novel that everyone will enjoy. It requires a patience and an appetite for wild, unexpected metaphors and language that reflects characters’ troubled state of mind. But it’s difficult not to behave like an enthusiastic twelve years old when reading such a pure, original apocalyptic vision. Blake Butler is one of the best, most transgressive and ambitious young writers we have and Alice Knott is another brilliant addition to his resume.
8.7/10
