Alice Knott

by Blake Butler

From the ingenious mind of a language master: a wildly inventive novel about art, surveillance, our age of viral violence—and one woman's psychic survival

A troubled, reclusive heiress, Alice Knott lives alone, haunted by memories of her deceased parents and mysterious, near-identical brother. Much of her fortune has been spent on a world-class collection of artwork, which she stores in a vault in her lonely, cavernous house. One day, she awakens to find several of her most prized artworks destroyed, the act of vandalism captured in a viral video that soon triggers a rash of copycat incidents. As more videos follow, and an astonishing legacy of international art hangs in the balance, Alice finds that she has become the chief suspect in an international conspiracy—even as her psyche becomes a shadowed landscape of childhood demons and cognitive disorder.

Hallucinatory, unsettling, almost physically immersive, Alice Knott is a mind-bending rabbit hole of a narrative: a virtuoso exploration of the meaning of art, the corporatization of culture, and the lasting afterlife of trauma, as well a deeply humane portrait of a woman whose struggles feel both fantastically apocalyptic and dangerously, universally real.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Literature, Art, 21st Century, Horror

320 pages, Hardcover

First published July 7, 2020

About the author

Blake Butler is the author of EVER, Scorch Atlas, and two books forthcoming in 2011 and 2012 from Harper Perennial. He edits 'the internet literature magazine blog of the future' HTML Giant. His other writing have appeared in The Believer, Unsaid, Fence, Dzanc's Best of the Web 2009. He lives in Atlanta.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Art… The tale begins with an artful description of a canvas… Woman III by by Willem de Kooning…

In the painting, a sprawl of subdued color – gray, gold, blue – forms an abstract female figure shown head-on: breasts like blunted pyramids, braced beneath shoulders so broad no ambulant human could hold them upright. Mangled, muddy hips bracket the focus of her crudely rendered crotch, outsized in turn by massive, jagged hands slung to her knees. Atop it all, the woman’s diminutive face, a landscape of moon dirt, leers slyly toward the viewer, as if aware of something inevitable none among us might wish to know.

The style of the narration is no less abstract than that of the painting.
Alice Knott is a hypothetical owner of the presumably stolen and destroyed Woman III… Nonexistent and abstract Alice Not…

Alice watches herself from inside herself perform for the police and the reporters, the cameras, the vortex represented in each eye. She gives them exactly what they wish for – content – even if every question they offer, for once, has a clear answer: “I don’t know.”

She recalls her childhood – everything is blurred… Was it real?  Or was it unreal? Everything goes to ruination… Memory… Art… Reality… Common sense… Everything is being destroyed… If not by man then by time…

It takes a while to recognize the body’s face: it is Alice Knott, a bygone name appearing in our mind as some echo of an icon of our memory, almost like a friend, or someone we’d wished to know in such a way, though really by now we are not sure who Alice Knott might be. She is so old it seems impossible; her skin a surgery of putty, puffy leather, lacing, colored veins. She has no hair, no teeth, no nails.

A purpose of the abstract art is to prove that even the most abstract abstractions have their use.

[talia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird. Abstract in the extreme. For fans of David Lynch, Steve Erickson. Some beautiful writing. Kafka-esque in the way that it defies our desire to read it as a straightforward allegory or metaphor. Original. Unique. In the acknowledgements section, the author cites Michel Foucault's as a major influence and much of the book revolves around surveillance and prisons. Sometimes it seemed as though Butler was using all the dream-like labyrinthine narrative to express something about the strangeness of living under social media, how it surveils us, and how, through our representations on it, makes us strangers to both ourselves and others.

"Beyond the door, the world around them opens up. They are in a lobby, or something like one, like the processing chamber from the prison but even larger, the walls farther apart and half translucent, rising high up to a glass ceiling that fills the room with artificial light. It's no longer certain which door in the wall behind them is the same they'd just come in through, already sealed shut and indistinguishable from the countless other doors on either side, line up to fill the wall in both directions as far as the room goes."

The above paragraph floats your boat, you will enjoy this book.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Our only human history is a sieve made of innumerable eyes, in innumerable lifetimes, through which the face of hell floods forever.

Alice Knott is a person with some very muddled memories who lives in a house that seems to contain endless ever-shifting rooms, like how her life and all of our lives are ever-shifting—from one moment to the next we are different people, moving forward toward the void while peering back at an increasingly self-altered past. We think it was a certain way, but was it really that way. A human life is not like a painting, static on the wall. And maybe that is why the many inspired/deranged zealots in this book attacked works of art hanging in museums and galleries. How is an image frozen in time reflective of the uncertainty of our daily lives? So destroy it! But then in the most pessimistic terms, Butler makes the resulting distortions themselves go up for auction, commanding even higher prices than the originals did. Even in the destruction we wreak, we are not free of the transactional nature of this life, the resulting commodification of everything.

Alice Knott is a person who at one time had a family. Now she lives alone in a cavernous house with a collection of expensive artwork locked in the basement. Her father used to sequester himself in his study and read a series of untitled books. The pages may have been blank or they may look different to whoever is reading them. Other people read these books—perhaps everyone does at some point. Alice thinks her father and her brother were replaced at some point with an unfather and an unbrother. She can’t reconcile her earliest memories with her later memories. Alice endures a lot, according to the text. But Alice also has a vivid imagination. Does she ever leave her house or is it all in her head? Is she merely a compendium of the innumerable versions of herself accumulated over a lifetime of thinking and dreaming?

There are moments in Blake Butler’s fictions where it feels as if they’re about to collapse under their own weight. The sheer breadth of conceptual content held in a single sentence strains the paragraph that cradles it, the words sagging in the middle and ballooning out at the edges, like an absurdly large parasitic cowbird chick wedged into a tiny songbird’s nest. And yet, moments of relative clarity gleam within the verbal onslaught. Some of his novels contain more of these moments than others. Ostensibly, this novel interrogates the meaning of art. What purpose does it serve. What value does it have. Who can see it and why. What does it mean when it is destroyed. Why is the destruction of a famous painting more of an effrontery against art than the destruction of one by an unknown artist. And what of a person and a person’s life. Can that be a work of art? Can a lifetime of one’s internal dialogue and ruminations be considered art? Is this collection of Alice’s mind’s machinations the ultimate work of art here? How do we put that on display and charge admission. How can we monetize it. Can we put a person in a cell and hook their brain up to a video feed. Now, how can we erase people’s memories so that every time they see an ad during this feed they think they’re seeing it for the first time. Oh, but wait. That is getting off track. Yet with Butler, there is never just one line of code. There are hundreds of them coursing through a single novel, crisscrossing each other, splicing together on their way to and from the motherboard, which is, of course, Butler’s brain.

How every you in you is as much you as you are, so every past and every future, for every cell, until we discover how we might obliterate the barrier between emotions, between our very lives and minds and times; to force the signified back up against its signifier; every current second against all others already past and yet to come, forming a continuity at last no longer representable by plot.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Never, mistaking procrastination for rumination, wait a few weeks after finishing to review a book you were excited to read but afraid it might be disappointing and then its demands and rewards smashed your expectations into ramifying smithereens but you neglected to take any notes because life is war and the reprieve you found in these alluring, tenuous, evocative, exhilarating pages was too good to interrupt looking for a pencil to scribble down some brutally amputated epiphany about art, memory, text, and/or subjectivity. Having found earlier Butlers scattershot with eerie splendor but ever only on the cusp of brilliance, I must say that this work displays a menacingly sharpened focus (though still largely "about" experiential fragmentation, disorientation, however you imagine thought sans ego) and a style of writing that kneecaps too quick reading so that the eyes (and brain, I guess) may linger unable to extricate themselves from sublimely contorted sentences warping through a gauntlet of pains, losses, absences, and paradoxes nowhere better suffered in transfixion. Sure, the incessant protean meanderings and flood of amorphous allness get tedious at times, but such a flaw (if it be) scarcely mars the godforsaken piercing inescapable nightmare blazing across the canvas. If, contrary to all indicators and the explicit aesthetic claims of this novel, life goes on, I will in gleeful mortification read this again more good.

[Kansas · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2024...

“Y aun así, por idénticos que parecieran los días, y aunque cada vez que se tumbaba imaginaba que aquel sería el último, seguía despertándose otra vez en otro día sin perdón, con suficientes retazos de recuerdos personales que le aseguraban que aun era quien creía que había sido, independientemente de lo que hubiera podido suceder sin su conocimiento, mientras estaba anestesiada en manos de otra persona, y de lo que ahora sabían de ella y de su mundo que ella no sabría nunca.”


Me ha gustado mucho esta novela de Blake Butler, aunque la he terminado con la sensación de no haberla tenido del todo atada, en el sentido de que Alice Knott es un personaje tan complejo y el estilo de Butler se camufla tanto con la personalidad, con la mente fragmentada de Alice, que sus metáforas brutales y también apocalípticas y surrealistas me han hecho darle varias vueltas a muchos párrafos. No es una novela fácil, pero estas son las mejores lecturas, cuando el lector tiene que bucear y se ve obligado a dejarse llevar por ese lenguaje que refleja el estado mental de sus personajes. Dos de mis novelas favoritas en lo que va de año han sido publicadas por Piel de Zapa: Entre, de Christine Brooke-Rose y El mar vivo de los sueños despiertos, de Richard Flanagan, así que ni me lo pensé en abordar esta Alice Knott de un autor al que no conocía todavía, y la verdad es que ha sido una compra arriesgada y casi a ciegas, pero ha resultado una experiencia lectora de las que te tiran directamente a la piscina, sin salvavidas...


"Es cada vez mas como si, de la misma forma en que su padre había desaparecido, estuvieran desapareciendo partes enteras del mundo y de la vida que ha vivido que ha vivido en él, como si estuvieran dentro de ella solo lo justo para advertir que no está."


No es gratuito que el personaje creado por Blake Butler se llame precisamente Alice, y aquí también como en Alicia en el Pais de las Maravillas, hay un espejo en el que la protagonista presiona su rostro y al hacerlo, Butler la sitúa en otro nivel, ¿en otra realidad alternativa? No lo sé, pero ese viaje iniciático de la Alicia de Lewis Carrol , se puede decir que es el mismo viaje de autodescubrimiento que emprende aquí Alice Knott de la mano de Butler pero ya en la vejez.“ Me había incrustado en tantas vidas y realidades, se oye pensar, a través del espejo, que saber que ninguna de ellas era tan mía como creía era aceptar mi propia aniquilación…” Alice que ya a estas alturas y gracias a Carrol simboliza la búsqueda de la propia identidad, es quizás lo que Blake Butler pretende al establecer la conexión, y aunque Alice Knott es ya una mujer madura, también la conoceremos como una niña perdida entre adultos en un ejercicio de memoria en el que el estilo es fundamental a la hora de proponer nuevos giros en los que Alice se va transformando frente a nosotros. La Alice de Butler también atraviesa un espejo para conocerse a sí misma.


“Y aun así no podemos quitarnos a Alice de la cabeza. En cada espejo, esperamos verla de nuevo tras el cristal, pero siempre es otra persona, un extraño o alguien cuya cara no recordamos , uno entre una hilera interminable de cuerpos, ninguno de los cuales parece entender que están aquí. Solo reconocemos el vacío tras sus miradas, el peso empalidecedor de una espera interminable con la que cooperan inconscientemente.”


La narración de Butler se transforma continuamente y lo digo sobre todo por el inicio que no tiene absolutamente nada que ver con la forma en la que va mutando la novela. Comienza como una especie de thriller en el que unas obras de arte son saqueadas del sótano de Alice Knott. Alice es una heredera ya envejecida que no ha salido de su casa en años y su principal distracción es controlar lo que ocurre en el mundo a través de sus dispositivos electrónicos. Aislada, encerrada, sin conexión con el mundo exterior físico se ve expuesta bajo el ojo del huracán cuando sus obras de arte son saqueadas y destruidas públicamente en unos videos que se hacen virales en internet. Tras esta destrucción pública, hay una especie de contagio, y comienza a haber una epidemia global en la que obras de arte son destruidas y saqueadas en todo el mundo por ciudadanos de la calle. El caso es que expuesto de esta forma, parece una especie de thriller o novela sobre conspiraciones, pero nada más lejos. Blake Butler se centra sobre todo en el personaje de Alice desde el momento en que se ve expuesta públicamente y ve su propia imagen en televisión incluso partes de su pasado en fotografías sacadas de su pasado por los medios porque entra en un conflicto, entre cómo realmente se ve a sí misma y cómo la ven los demás, así que no podrá entender que la gente tenga esa concepción preconcebida de ella: “De una forma u otra, había aprendido a decirse a sí misma, para nada en broma, aunque siempre la hacía reir, has tenido que anularte lo suficiente día a día hasta que al final no has podido distinguir la diferencia entre la vida y la muerte, entre ver y sentir, entre lo real y la nada.”


“Parecía que sucedía cada segundo, cada hora, mientras que todos los momentos en los que más se había sentido casi como ella de verdad eran también los más completamente abrumadores, obstruídos en su interior sin que ella pudiera hacer nada al respecto, hasta el punto de que hacer algo como leer y escribir se volvía prácticamente imposible. A la vuelta de cada esquina, pues, intuía una caída, un océano mucho más amplio que lo que jamás llegaría revelarse, a ser concebible; cada muro era solo un deseo y viceversa.”


Alice había usado su dinero en obras de arte, las encierra en el sótano y sin embargo apenas les prestaba atención pero de alguna forma saber que estaban allí eran una especie de seguro de que el mundo seguía funcionando, y ella, conectada con el mundo. Esta exposición pública, no tanto de sus obras de arte destruidas sino de ella misma es lo que la hace perder el control de cómo percibe el mundo y a sí misma, e incluso cuando ella piensa, tiene la impresión de que no es ella misma la que percibe o la que está situada en el mundo: “Entre tantos recuerdos fracturados, Alice intuye que las anteriores personas que viven en ella siguen ahí solo por casualidad, sombras de actuaciones antes nuevas, y ahora abandonadas a la deriva, buscando algo innegable y cierto en ella; no una salida sino una comprensión más profunda de lo que ella necesita…” Blake Butler consigue capturar los tiempos de ahora a través de un personaje tan aislado del mundo real, que llegado un punto incluso duda de su propia identidad, que es un detalle que se va evidenciando a medida que la novela va avanzando. La memoria de su infancia, de su familia primero la verdadera y luego sustituida por una familia con un hermano y un padre a los que su mente se niega a admitir, es lo que pueden producir la sensación en el lector de no saber dónde está situada la vida de Alice realmente. Pero no nos olvidemos que el estilo de Butler es definitivo a la hora de bucear en la mente de Alice, de su memoria llena de huecos y de vacíos, tanto, que dudará continuamente de sí misma.


"Así, el angustiante vacío que había en Alice se convirtió lentamente en un abismo cada vez más inmenso y palpable que se abría entre ella y las personas con las que dormía en habitaciones contiguas, erigiéndose como un muro que dejaba fuera a Alice y que reafirmaba la distorsión entre la persona que en otro tiempo había sentido que era y la persona en la que al parecer no podía negarse a convertirse."


Alice Knott es una novela inquietante y muy turbadora sobre todo en la forma en la que Butler expone la soledad física en contraposición a esa masificación de información que le llega a esa persona que se encuentra totalmente sola y aislada. “Tardó muy poco tiempo en sumirse en una resignación en continuo desarrollo, sentirse lo bastante perdida en el mundo para ocuparse solo de lo que podía discernir directamente a través de sus propios sentidos, por incierto o indeterminado que pareciera todo en el incesante emborronamiento de su existencia tal y como era ahora”. Yo diría que la novela de Butler funciona como un espejo en el que nos reflejamos a nosotros mismos en un mundo que reconocemos enseguida. Alice Knott está de alguna forma intentando desentrañar lo que le ocurre tras esos años de aislamiento bruscamente interrumpido por una exposición pública y es su mente la que comienza a ¿divagar? ¿o no es realmente así, y sin embargo es el entorno el que se está descajando a pasos agigantados? El que Alice esté más o menos cuerda no depende tanto de ella como de la sociedad en la que vive y en la que cualquiera que no se atenga a ciertas reglas, aparecerá expuesto o directamente expulsado. Blake Butler publicó esta novela en 2020 antes de que nos llegara la pandemia y sin embargo parecía estar vaticinando ciertos comportamientos sociales que se han acelerado desde entonces: el mundo va mucho más deprisa de lo que nosotros ahora mismo somos capaces de controlar o de gestionar.


“Al final la única forma que tendréis de comprender algo es no haberlo visto nunca; que ya no exista esta frase o ese libro , aunque solo sea en el contexto en el que el texto del libro se permite, diciéndolo directamente, volver a ser olvidado, o aun mejor, nunca leído y borrado por ti y solo por ti; porque debe haber una diferencia entre una máscara y lo que enmascara; todo lo que no podrías ni ver ni oír ni sentir en contraposición a lo que permanece en cualquier momento ante ti."


El arte es nuestra representación del mundo, y tal como decía Proust, una forma de detener el tiempo, de recuperarlo, así que en esta destrucción del arte puede estar simbolizada la destrucción de lo que somos, de nuestras emociones, ya que este arte está creado a partir de cómo el artista refleja emocionalmente la realidad que le circunda. Si lo destruímos no queda nada, y al igual que coleccionarlo puede haber sido para Alice una forma de mantenerse conectada a este mundo, una vez destruido, borrado de la faz de la tierra, ¿qué le/nos queda? Blake Butler describe este derrumbe mental a través de esta destrucción del arte. En este aspecto, Alice Knott puede resultar una obra fascinante, pero también es verdad que no es fácil penetrarla porque la clave puede estar en ese estilo en el que Butler sincroniza su narrativa con la propia mente de Alice. Lo que está claro es que Butler derrumba estas fachadas falsas en las que ahora mismo se construye este mundo en el que vivimos, y penetra en el interior más turbador. Nada es lo que parece porque todo va tan deprisa, que deja de existir al instante.


“Imaginad que solo quedaran ocho obras de arte en el mundo, por ejemplo. No importa quién las haya creado, aunque supongamos que quienquiera que las haya creado ya está muerto. Supongamos también, y no es una posibilidad remota, que nadie recuerda cómo hacer arte, y lo único que nos queda son esas ocho de obras de arte creadas por las manos de personas que nunca hemos oído hablar o siquiera podemos imaginar pisando el mismo suelo que nosotros. ¿Qué significarían para nosotros esas obras? ¿Sería imposible comprender como alguien pudo concebirlas? ¿Querríamos hacer otras a su imagen y semejanza o las despreciaríamos?"

♫♫♫Alice in vain - Sleeper♫♫♫

[Benoit Lelièvre · Rating 5 out of 5]

Blake Butler hasn't lost his fastball.

Six years after the immense 300 000 000, the dark lord of contemporary literature graces us with another vibrant, hyperkinetic journey through the self, where the mind of heiress Alice Knott is both the paint and the canvas. There's a lot of stuff to this novel:

- Butler's obsessions with the idea of home is back in full force. Alice's house is constantly shifting, changing and evolving with the events of the novel. It is no longer a safe haven.

- Paintings and various works of art are being destroyed by random people around the world. The idea itself sounds gimmicky, but count on Butler to make it unsettling and profound. The murder of art is not a gratuitous anarchist statement in Alice Knott, it's an attack on our very representation of the world.

- There's a statement about commodification I haven't completely wrapped my mind around. It's expressed through Alice's relationship to different bar codes while losing agency over herself.

-I know a lot of people consider Butler to be complete gobbledygook, but I think his writing style reflects a troublesome relationship to reality that some of us experience.

I'll be reviewing Alice Knott in depth on Dead End Follies on June 16 if you're interesting in knowing more.

[Mitch Loflin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an exhausting, overwhelming, isolating book. The world it created - or reflected (!!!) - made me feel helpless and frantic and awful. And it’s so so good. At times it feels like a tour of the best, smartest, most mind blowing haunted house ever created, and here the writing is vivid and graphic and palpable. Then at others, it’s richly philosophical and dense with meaning, with these incredible sentences that demand repeat readings. I loved this book, but now I think my brain is tingling, but it’s fine.

[Rhiannon Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review

Is this cover gorgeous? Yes!
Is this an "easy" read? No. Definitely not.
As a commentary on surveillance, creativity, the value/price of art, and mental illness, Blake Butler's Alice Knott could be studied at length--just as one might with a painting. Both a piece of art itself and a reflection on the art world, this metafiction masterpiece is truly mind-blowing. Not since Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves have I been so mesmerized by what a book can do.

After several pieces of artwork are stolen from Alice Knott’s vault, a video emerges of one painting’s detailed destruction. As the video goes viral and copycat artwork destructions increase, all eyes are on the formerly reclusive heiress. Atlanta author, Blake Butler uses Alice’s introspective monologues to deliver a layered novel analyzing art’s meaning, legacy, and value.

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[Ashley Crawford · Rating 5 out of 5]

This terrifying, at times utterly nauseating and scabrous novel begins with a series of murders so grotesque as to be unimaginable. The victims’ skins are torched, burnt to raw carbon, their flesh is slashed, their epidermis is punched and pummelled and bruised to a point beyond recognition. They are urinated on and humiliated in ways unimaginable. And they suffer it all in silence. For They are Art. We can say goodbye to Goya’s masterful Saturn Devouring His Son (a personal favourite) and any number of other masterpieces. In a strange way one seems to watch, rather than read, these atrocities and it is a society of the spectacle even Guy Debord would blanch at. Blake Butler has crossed the line and in doing so created his own horrendous masterpiece. To be sure this is Alice in Wonderland, but it is a wonderland of violence, schizophrenia, delusion and dementia. Although one can sense Butler’s influences – his own struggles with insomnia, the cinematic weirdness of Lynch and Cronenberg, the savagery of Michael Gira’s music, and most especially the psych-fi of J.G. Ballard’s tortured protagonists, the voice is Butler's alone. It must be said that I have been something of a Blake Butler fan since his first book, Scorch Atlas, in 2009. But, with Alice Knott, Butler has surpassed himself. Read at your psychological peril.

[Peter Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everything starts out strange, but you can follow it. Then the writing hits and the familiar becomes threatening. You feel as if you’ve fallen into anther space, similar but different than the one you know. The weird thing is that we’re living in such a time and, like reading this book, you have no idea why the world has gotten so dangerous. But here you are.

[Lori · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wow. WTFH did I just listen to?

Here we have a ridiculously wealthy hermit named Alice Knott, owner of some of the most expensive pieces of art in existence. She awakens one day to find the vault in which they were contained empty, and a viral video is released in which each painting is being maliciously destroyed. From there, we are made aware that this event kicks off a series of copycat burgalies and vandalisms around the world, and we witness the beginning of Alice's mental deterioration as she struggles to remember details about her own past as she becomes the main suspect in these crimes - who her family members were, the very layout of her ever-shift, ever changing house... or... perhaps this is all in her head? Or perhaps I didn'd understand a god damned thing? All of the above is a possiblity, as this book literally made not one ounce of sense.

I typically adore Blake's writing style but this just sounded so unlike him. I kept thinking to myself that I should DNF this...and had I been reading it in print, I probably would have. But since it was on audio and I was listening on my drive to and from work, I figured I wasn't wasting time in the same way. Looking back, I should have DNFd it because the deeper we got into the book, the more convoluted and frustrating it became.

[Shawn · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was not for me. I found it to be one long, tedious spooky philosophy/art history lesson. Here, have a little taste:

"within which what I was when I was where I was when I was who to whoever else I wasn't was as much me as the rest of the shape of everywhere I'd never seen"

It's stuff like that that makes me feel I am reading legalese, which for me is as entertaining as watching spit evaporate on the ground. There is some genuinely great imagery here, but it is all dispersed and isolated as oasis in a vast desert. Want another taste of the constant contradictory nonsense that must be deep thinking for someone, somewhere:

"None of what had really happened, until it had, Alice understands; her every action surrounded by the fact of what was not."

In conclusion if you want to read a slightly compelling plot based around the nature of identity and memory crippled to the point of unintelligibility by being packed to the brim with hot air, this is for you.

[holden · Rating 5 out of 5]

2020 sucks but at least Blake Butler put out another book.

[Regan · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5/5 Stars.
Butler's prose is outstanding; every page contains a "wow" sentence, a "wow" psychological observation. Alice Knott has the trappings of a whodunnit art heist mystery tale--a spinster heiress (Alice) invests the family fortune in extremely valuable works of art which she houses in a private vault beneath her familial home. She wakes one day to see a viral video of one of her most famous acquisitions being destroyed, and only then discovers her vault had been breached. A mass movement of art-destruction follows in the wake of the viral video. The exterior trappings of this mystery are just that--traps--to bring the reader in so as to make them consider the deeper mystery of who Alice Knott really is. To crib Walt Whitman, Alice "contains multitudes."

I can't help but comparing Alice Knott to so many other virtuosic post/modern novels written by men about the interior lives of isolated women, like Madame Bovary, Musil's Five Women, Wittgenstein's Mistress, Elizabeth Costello, etc. etc. to name but a few. What's notably consistent in all these treatments is the (archetypal) heroine's uniform sense of disorientation, of disembodiment, disconnection not only from the world, but from herself. Butler seizes the trope and runs with it, possibly explodes it.

It was a good read, even if I have no idea what to make of the ending. Would recommend to others to encourage you to give me answers.

[Gabriel Congdon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A supremely weird book

It reminded me of that book where that woman wrote messages in the streets. (Madness is a woman’s game, guys we.) It was so weird. Alice receives a bizarre upbringing, allowing her, to be as kooky as a grandfather emporium. You go outside, the world’s just as crazy. These tea party guests help keep the vibe mysterious. Is it the mind or the world? Butler’s format and style punches the effect home, it’s all in blocks, and (spoiler) like no dialog. (cont’d spoil: about some in, it seems like there’s finally going to be a scene where characters talk, nope, not this book) (Another spoiler: It’s like, Borg, I think.)

One thing I thought, the religious moment as it’s sometimes described, is usually accompanied with words like love or understanding, a way to make a mind-change in perspective less scary. But you sans those away, the feeling would be terrifying one. That’s what made this such a scary and uncomfortable read, it’s like float into a nightmare.

The comma, what a comma book! It’s more comma than not. They’re like the scales in his serpentine prose style.

[Leo Robertson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wow people seem to have gone nuts for this one!

Plenty to like. Like DeLillo meets Evenson.

I like Blake Butler's prose and what he's going after, and I will certainly keep reading his books :) But like Moshfegh maybe, I feel like his meandering narratives work better in short story form. Anything longer ends up feeling like a long short story, especially with the variation-on-a-theme style of this one. Mad people are destroying art, a woman is going mad in her home. It's true on page 1, and by page 50 you get the impression it'll be true on page 300 and you'll be none the wiser why. If that doesn't sound like a journey you'd enjoy (I mean it's from point A to point A) maybe not for you ;)

I'd love a short story collection from Butler one day! He doesn't have one yet, right?

[James B · Rating 4 out of 5]

A group of people break into Alice Knott’s mansion and steal her world famous collection of paintings and upload a video of them later destroying the art. This sparks a world wide copycat epidemic. But the real story of the book is Alice, the most unreliable narrator you’ll ever come across. This is a tough read, but if you can let yourself go and take the ride, there are many pleasures to be had.

[Caroline Gerardo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think I am Alice. I live alone on a ranch in California while artwork I collected in the 1980's is in a vault in Wyoming. My heart aches for her tragedy. What is her substance? Do I know her soul?
Blake Butler takes us for a ride, you won't put it down, I promise.

[Ellery Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fucking wild

[Tobias · Rating 5 out of 5]

Staggeringly good.

[Amy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I gave up about a quarter of the way into the book. It felt like more work than it was worth, wading through the dense narrative which felt like the author's attempt to show everyone all the big words he knows. The writing is difficult, the story slow to unfold, and what I read simply did not compel me to keep reading.

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k16dx...

[David Rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Built to rearrange your neurons, as Blake's books tend to be.

[Samuel Moss · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having closed this book
I am now
awake

[Dylan McMahon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was so excited to read this. A surrealist and disturbing mix of speculative fiction and psychological horror? Comparisons to David Lynch? Recommended by Dennis Cooper? It sounds awesome!

It was not. It was incredibly disappointing, and much of it comes down to one fatal flaw: the writing.

This book has some of the baggiest and most overwrought prose I've read in some time. Every action, every thought, every piece of the character's environment is described in excessive and exhausting detail with clunky and repetitive sentences.

Here is a car arriving at its destination:

"Then, like that, just as she's enjoying the procession, she's arrived; or so the device announces, ceasing its dictation, returning to its default state to await the next command."

Why must Butler tell us three times that the GPS device has stopped? Nothing past that semi-colon is relevant. And its not like this is the first time in the passage that the GPS has been brought up. It's purposeless.

Here is a moment where the protagonist is looking outside of a window in a prison:

"At last, for once, though, at this wider window, which she still is not quite sure why they have brought her out to see-a reward for good behavior, allowing a peek behind the scenes?-she finds she no longer feels it necessary to believe anything enough to not expect to one day ask again and receive a different answer."

This sentence is a complete mess. With its THREE starting conjunctions and bafflingly long-winded description of doubt (an emotion that is, notably, simple and felt by literally everyone on planet Earth), it is a sentence that is meant to impress by being "complex" or "difficult to parse", but in actuality is just needlessly verbose.

And, because bad things always come in threes, here's one last example, where the main character is thinking about a robbery:

"As for the recent breach, though, specifically the recordings made as the robbery took place-that is, the only direct evidence, as it remained-all of that had been handled for her, transferred under her approval to the authorities for their investigation: a cooperative gesture, ill-advised from a legal standpoint despite the fact that she maintains nothing to hide."

Keep in mind, we have been told prior to this that there were security cameras recording it. Multiple times. And yet we hear it again, several times over, in this cluttered and repetitive sentence.

The book is barely over 300 pages, with isolated, spaced off paragraphs and frequent chapter breaks that add lots of blank space. Despite this short length it took me almost a week to get through, precisely because of how tedious and exhausting the writing is. There are parts that spend less time with the main character and the prose will finally becomes a bit more concise. However, these are far outweighed by moments of the main character solipsizing that made me wanna rip my hair out.

There were some stretches that were intriguing and eerie, and at points the writing was good, even great. But good lord God, did this need to be edited. Heavily.

[Al · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alice Knott took me into physic spaces I’ve never experienced before. Butler’s description of the world’s most famous paintings being destroyed feels so inevitable, so gorgeously and bleakly surreal that you wonder how this hasn’t been written before. As for Alice--many writers try to write about people who are alone in the world, to capture what it means to be cut off in some extreme way, but this is the first book I’ve read that makes me become the insanity of that aloneness—be inside the insanity feeding the aloneness and the aloneness the insanity. Made me aware in a new way too of what it means to have connections with people who aren’t around anymore but whom we can’t stop reacting to in our heads because our memory of them is us, active. Butler is a master at writing liminal spaces—at capturing the depth of the reality that our lives are transitory, that we are constantly in a transitory state. In this way, I find his writing spiritual, supernatural, pulsing with the mystery of being. The prose itself is beautiful—has a taut, abstracted quality, a textured coolness with a sense of blood underneath, that makes me feel like I’m reading the paintings it describes being destroyed. Existential horror shot through with flashes of the hilarious and profound. Intensely serious yet playful.

[William Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a brilliant book. I haven't felt energized to be so active in my reading, to re-read passages, to be inside the writing in a long while. I don't know if anyone else gets a certain vibe from New Directions books, but I felt those waves radiating from this one. It is deliberate and technical and wrought from hard forged steel. All of my updates about memory and remembering, the illusory and slippery nature of memory, the relativeness of our inner lives, is true in this book and makes it feel surreal. Powerfully surreal, but wholly compartmentalized, firmly sectioned off and dissected, clinically, to present the reader with a picture so crisp that we can virtually inhabit the prose.

Dropping this from a 5 to a 4 because I feel as though the last 100, or just an additional 100 pages, was tacked on here to fulfill some silly publisher's quota and not necessarily to add anything more to the story. Sigh. Stalled out at page 200 and then just waded through most of the ending.

[Downward · Rating 3 out of 5]

i get the sense that butler is maybe the best writer of his generation but his work feels mostly opaque to me. there are sentences here where butler is standing on his head, doing impossibly athletic and acrobatic things with words and threading a kind of psychological needle that makes the read (or me at least) feel deeply uncomfortable with this view of the world, where the destruction of art functions metaphorically as the breakdown of society; the immolation of one important piece of art leads to people all over the world destroying art and themselves. we've lost context for the art beyond destruction and we've lost context for life beyond destruction and we're fully inside Alice's head, walking the labyrinth of her memory while the world collapses around her and she's to blame. but I might be getting this all wrong because reading this was like looking at something beautiful through water, abstracted and shimmering, which is kind of cool in its own right.

[Kathleen Gray · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not an easy read. Butler takes you inside the mind of Alice Knott, an heiress whose art collection has been pillaged and is being vandalized- and the acts of violence against the paintings have become viral videos. Is she a reliable narrator? No, she's mentally ill and struggling with reality. She's been alone in her house for too many years and she's got a lot tumbling around in her head. Butler throws many ideas, some of which stick, some of which don't. It's overwritten in spots (oh for an editor with a sharp pen) but in others the language is gorgeous. It's a completely character driven novel. What's the takeaway- that loneliness and aloneness are destructive in so many ways (a lesson for the pandemic!). Thanks to Edelweiss for the ARC. For fans of literary fiction.

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished this a while ago but wasn't sure what to say. It's really fucking good. The ending is fucking crazy and so dark it actually went from like psychological mystery to full on surrealism to like futurist horror, I don't even know. How do we make sense of the world? Is it our working psyche? our memories? art? Can art make sense of a world when your psyche is nearly destroyed? How about when your memories are unreliable? Is art unreliable? What is the future of art? Constant performance? Social media? Does creation fuel destruction or does destruction fuel creation? Or is Alice Knott or Alice Smith or Alice Novak or whatever her fucking name is just a lost cause? Man this book raised a lot of questions and in the process of answering them approached answering infinite or some shit. Who knows what this book is about, it's awesome.