Max Guy’s Reviews > Blue Ruin > Status Update

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.

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.