Max Guy’s Reviews > Blue Ruin > Status Update
  
    
      Max Guy
      is on page 27 of 272
    
    
    
      I’m really curious about where a story like this goes. Stories that begin with such banal and established suffering. The protagonist is one of those barely living precarious laborers—a “failed artist.” But I haven’t gotten there just yet.
    
    
      — Aug 03, 2025 09:07AM
    
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      Max Guy
      is on page 41 of 272
    
    
    
      One of the things I look for in any fictional account of artists’ lives, and the setting, is an accuracy that is really just a mirror to my own life as an artist. I usually want a number of cultural signifiers that ultimately end up more like tropes. This book has some tropes but I think Jay’s first person accounts of his envy do something important. They function like fictional criticism. Fictional criticality.
    
    
      — Aug 03, 2025 01:54PM
    
  
