Synopsis
Originally published in Britain, Jonathan Gibbs’ Randall is quite simply one of the shrewdest and most outrageous art-world novels in the English language. The eponymous artist at the book’s center is a provocateur, a manipulator and a vandal—but also quite possibly a genius. Seen through the eyes of Vincent, his finance bro friend, admirer and rival in love, Randall is an artist for whom art is less an aesthetic challenge than a marketing problem, an act of aggression and a spoof (if also a consuming passion). Readers will be fascinated and appalled, but also faced with profound questions about art, commerce, and our debts to one another. As Vincent eventually discovers after his friend’s death, there is a lot more to Randall than showmanship, and a lot more to his art than the funhouse mirror he holds up to the vanities around him. British reviewers raved. Now Americans can see what all the fuss was about.
Born in Trinidad and raised in Britain,
Jonathan Gibbs is a writer and critic in London.
Randall was his debut novel and was followed by a second,
The Large Door, as well as a book of poetry, Spring Journal: after Louis MacNeice. He teaches creative writing at City St. George’s, University of London and curates the online short story project
A Personal Anthology.
“Writing about the visual arts is usually as risky as sharing needles… But Gibbs has produced the sort of novel you pray for as a reviewer.” — Tibor Fischer, The Guardian
“An extremely funny satire of the dirty business of art curation, archiving, buying and selling… Slowly reveals itself as a moving account of friendship, love and loss… relayed in Gibbs’ charming voice, rich in depth and confidence and as knowingly precise as the deftest of brush strokes.” — Lee Rourke, The New Humanist
“Gibbs’s novel is more than mischief: as with all the best lampoons, it dissects things that really matter and have gone awry – in this case the relegation of artistic innovation to banal shock value… The characterisation is disarmingly sympathetic and the prose fluid and inventive, right up to the final, playful revelation.” —Toby Lichtig, The Telegraph
“Gibbs has worked a double shift, disguising a well-turned tale of family secrecy as an acerbic essay on recent cultural history without short-changing the demands of either.” — Anthony Cummins, The Observer
“Long awaited and well worth the wait.” — Geoff Dyer
