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Poughkeepsie Friends
Immaculate Blue
From the award-winning author of The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov comes the brilliantly conceived and precisely rendered novel Immaculate Blue, which explores the lives of four people - Anatole, Leigh, Chris, and Lydia - and their intermingled and unwinding desires. Set in upstate New York, the novel follows these characters as they achieve their aims in lives redolent with loss and hope, humor and sadness, union and alienation. Russell picks up the thread of his critically acclaimed novel The Salt Point 20 years later and tracks the lives of these friends, some of whom not only lost touch with each other but have also lost their way. Moving, at times shocking, and always memorable, Immaculate Blue points to where the personal and the political come together and shape our lives in unexpected ways. With this newest novel, Paul Russell reminds us of why he is one of the most important voices on the literary scene.
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First published December 16, 2014
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About the author
Paul Russell
36 books136 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
Paul Russell received his doctorate from Cornell in 1983 for a dissertation on the novelist Vladimir Nabokov and is currently a Professor in the English Department at Vassar College.
His fourth novel, The Coming Storm won the 2000 Ferro-Grumley Award for Gay Male Fiction.
His short fiction has appeared in literary journals such as Black Warrior Review, and Carolina Quarterly.
Paul Russell received his doctorate from Cornell in 1983 for a dissertation on the novelist Vladimir Nabokov and is currently a Professor in the English Department at Vassar College.
His fourth novel, The Coming Storm won the 2000 Ferro-Grumley Award for Gay Male Fiction.
His short fiction has appeared in literary journals such as Black Warrior Review, and Carolina Quarterly.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
November 18, 2015
Immaculate Blue is about nothing and yet about everything, particularly if you are gay and your "wonder years" were in the late 80's and early 90's. If you read Russell's The Salt Point from 1990, this book follows the same group of friends now twenty years later as their paths cross again in Poughkeepsie for a wedding. No worries if you haven't read The Salt Point though; you won't be lost.
The story unfolds in three long chapters in which Russell weaves back and forth between the different characters' point of view. In the first chapter, Chris returns to Poughkeepsie to reunite with friends Anatole and Lydia for Anatole's wedding. Much of the story explores what has happened to each of the three friends over the last twenty years. Chris moved away while Anatole and Lydia stayed in Poughkeepsie. Chapter two is the wedding. Chapter three follows Chris after the wedding as he reconnects with another friend before leaving Poughkeepsie.
If you aren't familiar with some of Russell's other work, like The Coming Storm or War Against the Animals, you might find yourself bored at first. Russell likes to explore the human condition and gives the reader a well-rounded look into each of his main characters, so the story tends to move at a slow pace with not a lot of drama happening on the page. You really feel like you know these people by the time you finish the book. Or you at least connect with the way they are feeling and where they are in life. Immaculate Blue is no different. while I haven't lived such an intense life as Chris, I still connected with how lost he felt.
Having had a close group of friends during my glory days that I sadly abandoned when I moved away, I related very well to Chris's re-connection with his friends. We like to say that today we could pick up right where we left off, but there are always questions unanswered and things that we don't know about each other that have happened since then. The last chapter definitely explores those "what if's" that we fantasize about coming true.
Having read The Salt Point many years ago when I was younger and at a different place in life, it was nice to catch up with these characters much like old friends and see how much we've all changed.
The story unfolds in three long chapters in which Russell weaves back and forth between the different characters' point of view. In the first chapter, Chris returns to Poughkeepsie to reunite with friends Anatole and Lydia for Anatole's wedding. Much of the story explores what has happened to each of the three friends over the last twenty years. Chris moved away while Anatole and Lydia stayed in Poughkeepsie. Chapter two is the wedding. Chapter three follows Chris after the wedding as he reconnects with another friend before leaving Poughkeepsie.
If you aren't familiar with some of Russell's other work, like The Coming Storm or War Against the Animals, you might find yourself bored at first. Russell likes to explore the human condition and gives the reader a well-rounded look into each of his main characters, so the story tends to move at a slow pace with not a lot of drama happening on the page. You really feel like you know these people by the time you finish the book. Or you at least connect with the way they are feeling and where they are in life. Immaculate Blue is no different. while I haven't lived such an intense life as Chris, I still connected with how lost he felt.
Having had a close group of friends during my glory days that I sadly abandoned when I moved away, I related very well to Chris's re-connection with his friends. We like to say that today we could pick up right where we left off, but there are always questions unanswered and things that we don't know about each other that have happened since then. The last chapter definitely explores those "what if's" that we fantasize about coming true.
Having read The Salt Point many years ago when I was younger and at a different place in life, it was nice to catch up with these characters much like old friends and see how much we've all changed.
November 15, 2015
Some novels present a protagonist that the reader follows through a series of events or conflicts. These types of narratives are pretty standard. That's not what you're going to find here. This book constantly shifts perspective and drifts from one person to another effortlessly. Paul Russell is a master at this technique that allows the reader to become so immersed in the mind of the characters that their lives become as important as our own. We live through them vicariously. The real problem becomes that none of these characters are what can be easily identified as protagonists. They are in fact antagonists to each other's stories. This complicated lattice style of narrative is beautifully executed with eloquent prose that brings to life a myriad of diverse characters. And like all good novels, I found myself wishing it had not ended when it did. I wanted to continue my visit with Anatole, Chris, Lydia & Chris and all the rest of their friends and family as soon as the last page was reached. What makes this particularly frustrating this time is that this novel, Immaculate Blue is already a sequel to The Salt Point, an equally delicious novel. This latest chapter is set 27 years later and we find that all four of our principal characters have traveled some rather unexpected, yet frustratingly understandable, paths in life. Like the first novel, we can't really like any of these people. But we can't dislike them either. They are each complex and inconsistent characters that act and react just like our own acquaintances do: frustrating in their unpredictable predictability. But perhaps the author presented it best when he offers this observation: But it's not rel life. It's just America.
March 20, 2016
It is fitting that Paul Russell bookends his first novel with a seamless sequel that is the best book this peerless author has written to date. I loved the way Russell continues the story of Lydia, Anatole, Chris and Leigh in a way that comments on some of the most divisive socio-political issues facing the gay community today.
The biggest set-piece is the marriage between Anatole and his long-time lover Rafa, in the wake of New York State allowing gay marriage. Russell’s depiction of the married life of this middle-aged gay couple is heartbreakingly honest; he slowly ratchets up the tension for the wedding banquet itself, and these pages alone are one of the best advertisements for gay marriage (and happiness) possible.
Russell is hardly a sentimental author though, with his first novel showing a penchant for the psychopathology of desire and deviancy. In other words, he likes writing about fucked-up characters and their lives.
And none are more fucked-up than Chris Havilland, owner of the Immaculate Blue record store in Poughkeepsie, whose dark journey towards abasement forms the heart of this often grim but important novel.
I think Russell is a difficult author to like, simply because he writes about such difficult people. He certainly has no delusions about his characters himself, at one point describing Anatole as a “borderline paedophile” and Lydia as “a sad desperate cradle-robber”.
But the slow build up to the wedding banquet and the idyllic elaboration of gay marriage as a bastion of Western convention soon gives way to a far darker and more essential confrontation: between Chris and Leigh himself, the eponymous Boy of the Mall, who disappears under such dramatic circumstances at the end of The Salt Point.
I was quite dismayed when I began to have some sense of where Russell was taking his story; the bleakness it plummets in the end is very despairing, and does not make for a comfortable read at all. But there is truth here, as dark as it, and love too, piercing the gloom.
The biggest set-piece is the marriage between Anatole and his long-time lover Rafa, in the wake of New York State allowing gay marriage. Russell’s depiction of the married life of this middle-aged gay couple is heartbreakingly honest; he slowly ratchets up the tension for the wedding banquet itself, and these pages alone are one of the best advertisements for gay marriage (and happiness) possible.
Russell is hardly a sentimental author though, with his first novel showing a penchant for the psychopathology of desire and deviancy. In other words, he likes writing about fucked-up characters and their lives.
And none are more fucked-up than Chris Havilland, owner of the Immaculate Blue record store in Poughkeepsie, whose dark journey towards abasement forms the heart of this often grim but important novel.
I think Russell is a difficult author to like, simply because he writes about such difficult people. He certainly has no delusions about his characters himself, at one point describing Anatole as a “borderline paedophile” and Lydia as “a sad desperate cradle-robber”.
But the slow build up to the wedding banquet and the idyllic elaboration of gay marriage as a bastion of Western convention soon gives way to a far darker and more essential confrontation: between Chris and Leigh himself, the eponymous Boy of the Mall, who disappears under such dramatic circumstances at the end of The Salt Point.
I was quite dismayed when I began to have some sense of where Russell was taking his story; the bleakness it plummets in the end is very despairing, and does not make for a comfortable read at all. But there is truth here, as dark as it, and love too, piercing the gloom.
March 22, 2018
I'm going to be very honest Paul Russell is excellent writer and that's what got it three stars. As far as story and characters I cannot believe how much I disliked both. I thought each character was vile in their 0wn way and I couldn't wait for this to end. I mean it with all my heart Mr Russell is an excellent writer.
August 6, 2025
This is not really a sequel, more a return, to characters already visited (in Paul Russell's brilliant first novel, the 1990 'Salt Point'). Perhaps my enjoyment of this novel has a great deal to do with my lack of enjoyment of another novel which was also about disparate characters coming together to face up to a complicated past ('Kings of the Water' by Mark Behr). Russell has written a very fine novel ranging over themes he has touched on in previous novels and ones I can't help thinking reflect aspects of himself:
"He's not wanted to admit it to himself; its been haunting him all weekend, it's made him feel churlish and duplicitous and uncouth, but he finds something depressing about middle-aged gay couples. The whole farce of Anatole and Rafa's wedding, their craven attempt to mimic something that doesn't really belong to them, however much they and their well meaning friends try to pretend. Man up, he wants to tell them - but he never will...If you're going to fall for men, or boys, then deal with the fact that you are going to be an outcast. It's not for the faint of heart, its not for anybody hoping to be liked or respected or accepted or any of that bullshit. It takes courage, it takes armor and cunning and stealth and a fire burning you up inside. And its going to be fucking lonely and probably lethal in the end. So get used to it." (page 182 of my edition)
or again:
"It comes to him, as he blathers here in the parking lot: there is something Leigh, Chris and Dana share, something elusive as a scent, something at once insubstantial and totally alluring...Because, let's face it, with the Leighs and Chrises and Danas of the world there's the obsession, the exhilaration, the despair, but there's no real, enduring life to be had..." (page 155 of my edition)
and finally:
"There's the solid world of marriage and family and ceremony - Chris glimpsed all that yesterday. Then there is this other world that feels like leaning very far out over an abyss, where there is only the infinite drop and the momentary, insanely gratifying experience of sheer being...he has the residual feeling he sometimes gets when he wakes from a dream - of having almost grasped something essential, without which life is just darkness, confusion, despair."
Not that someone else could not pick out another three quotes and give a different impression of the novel. They struck me powerfully because the novel struck me powerfully - perhaps because I fear, though I hope I am wrong, that this is Mr. Russell's, valedictorian novel. That this novel bookends his first and that it is now over fourteen years since he last published a novel makes this almost a certainty. If it is his final word it is a powerful, prescient and reflective response to the challenges and changes he has chronicled in his six other novels. Russell is one of 20th century America's finest novelists - I refuse to call him a 'gay' novelist because what he has to say is more universal and, I have reached an age when I will accept the use of any LGBT+ label only when 'straight' novelist are also labelled.
Finally I can't help commenting on how some reviewers have found the major characters in the novel unsympathetic, even unlikeable. It made me wonder why I didn't find them so. Maybe it is age and the realisation that almost everyone I love or like or have loved or liked is flawed and potentially, if not actually, unlikeable.
"He's not wanted to admit it to himself; its been haunting him all weekend, it's made him feel churlish and duplicitous and uncouth, but he finds something depressing about middle-aged gay couples. The whole farce of Anatole and Rafa's wedding, their craven attempt to mimic something that doesn't really belong to them, however much they and their well meaning friends try to pretend. Man up, he wants to tell them - but he never will...If you're going to fall for men, or boys, then deal with the fact that you are going to be an outcast. It's not for the faint of heart, its not for anybody hoping to be liked or respected or accepted or any of that bullshit. It takes courage, it takes armor and cunning and stealth and a fire burning you up inside. And its going to be fucking lonely and probably lethal in the end. So get used to it." (page 182 of my edition)
or again:
"It comes to him, as he blathers here in the parking lot: there is something Leigh, Chris and Dana share, something elusive as a scent, something at once insubstantial and totally alluring...Because, let's face it, with the Leighs and Chrises and Danas of the world there's the obsession, the exhilaration, the despair, but there's no real, enduring life to be had..." (page 155 of my edition)
and finally:
"There's the solid world of marriage and family and ceremony - Chris glimpsed all that yesterday. Then there is this other world that feels like leaning very far out over an abyss, where there is only the infinite drop and the momentary, insanely gratifying experience of sheer being...he has the residual feeling he sometimes gets when he wakes from a dream - of having almost grasped something essential, without which life is just darkness, confusion, despair."
Not that someone else could not pick out another three quotes and give a different impression of the novel. They struck me powerfully because the novel struck me powerfully - perhaps because I fear, though I hope I am wrong, that this is Mr. Russell's, valedictorian novel. That this novel bookends his first and that it is now over fourteen years since he last published a novel makes this almost a certainty. If it is his final word it is a powerful, prescient and reflective response to the challenges and changes he has chronicled in his six other novels. Russell is one of 20th century America's finest novelists - I refuse to call him a 'gay' novelist because what he has to say is more universal and, I have reached an age when I will accept the use of any LGBT+ label only when 'straight' novelist are also labelled.
Finally I can't help commenting on how some reviewers have found the major characters in the novel unsympathetic, even unlikeable. It made me wonder why I didn't find them so. Maybe it is age and the realisation that almost everyone I love or like or have loved or liked is flawed and potentially, if not actually, unlikeable.
December 26, 2018
Sequel to The Salt Point, written twenty-five years later. Also takes up the characters' lives twenty-five years later, and they're all quite different. Too different, in my opinion, particularly Chris. There are attempts to explain the changes, but they're insufficient -- again, especially with Chris. Not a happy book. Couldn't put it down, just like you can't look away from a pimple-popping video on youtube or a train wreck in real life, as the cliche goes. Words are nice, though, even if the characters are despicable and the plot leaves you feeling rather empty at the end.
September 1, 2017
Any time I finish a book in two days it gets at least 4 stars. I had just finished reading The Salt Point, and immediately started Immaculate Blue, which picks up the same characters from Salt Point 20 years later. I recommend reading the two books that way. The flaws I saw in Salt Point get resolved, to a great extent, in Immaculate Blue. I raced through the book to see what was going to happen next.
June 12, 2021
Maybe I need to read the first book The Salt Point. The characters are the most despicable I have seen in a book, particularly Chris. What was the point of this book? This is about nothing. Was there a need for a sex scene that lasts pages and pages and actually gets boring and then the book ends. The only interesting thing was the description of the wedding with all its cliches. This was a waste of time.
June 28, 2018
This book was a sequel to "The Salt Point" which I had read a number of years ago and takes place almost 30 years later. The central character is not a nice person and he revisits people whom he knew in the past for no discernible reason. I enjoyed this book with its striking characterizations and social wit and you don't have too have read the earlier book to enjoy it.
February 24, 2019
I loved Immaculate Blue which took place 20 years after The Salt Point. I often find myself very invested in the lives of the characters in the books that I read. I loved catching up with the friends from The Salt Point twenty years later, and I wish more authors would follow up on their characters.
December 26, 2023
Not what I expected, but turned out to be a very good read. I wish we got more of the rest of the families stories instead of focusing solely on Chris towards the middle and ultimately at the end but he did have the most conflicting storyline so I guess it makes sense. “Nothing personal — I just realized it was a ghost I was trying to fuck, not you.” Best line of the whole book.
November 9, 2017
Uncomfortably adult. "The only reason you never mention a person's existence to your lover is because you don't want to diminish their secret power by putting it into words." That was the fifth star for me!!
July 25, 2021
Audio
July 26, 2017
Reread the Salt Point before this, this is sequel to Salt Point, also read again War Against the Animals
May 13, 2016
Great Read
I literally could not put my Kindle down while reading this gem of a novel. It contains complex, very real contemporary characters. In this story, the past and the present are in conflict as two gay men and a straight women reunite after decades. Their reunion is filled with regret, anger, passion, sexual tension, and confusion. The main character is Chris, an existential, a self-proclaimed hit man who protects Americans in Nigeria. Chris returns to the US to attend the gay wedding of an old friend, who still has a thing for Chris. (Chris reminded me of a haunted Graham Greene protagonist.) The three main characters are obsessed with Leigh, a pretty 18 year old boy who disappeared from their lives twenty years ago. Chris hooks up with Leigh towards the powerful last third of the novel.
Paul Russell is a favorite author of mine, and this is his best book yet.
I literally could not put my Kindle down while reading this gem of a novel. It contains complex, very real contemporary characters. In this story, the past and the present are in conflict as two gay men and a straight women reunite after decades. Their reunion is filled with regret, anger, passion, sexual tension, and confusion. The main character is Chris, an existential, a self-proclaimed hit man who protects Americans in Nigeria. Chris returns to the US to attend the gay wedding of an old friend, who still has a thing for Chris. (Chris reminded me of a haunted Graham Greene protagonist.) The three main characters are obsessed with Leigh, a pretty 18 year old boy who disappeared from their lives twenty years ago. Chris hooks up with Leigh towards the powerful last third of the novel.
Paul Russell is a favorite author of mine, and this is his best book yet.
September 1, 2016
Slow at first, but the pace picked up and I enjoyed this one. Hard to call something a sequel that is written and based 25 years later. I read the predecesor - The Salt Point - but remembered very little.
December 29, 2015
When I finished Immaculate Blue I was able to understand Salt Point.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews