We Live Here Now

Rose (Who’s Who When Everyone Is Someone Else) links the art world and the shipping industry in this beguiling and surreal novel, a spiraling set of narratives loosely tethered to a controversial artist. The book begins with an art critic’s essay on Sigismunda Conrad, who dropped out of the art world after her 2015 installation We Live Here Now was rumored to cause visitors and gallery staff to disappear. The following chapters tell the stories of people in Conrad’s orbit, such as art dealer Kasha, who’s been moving a Conrad piece around the world for the past few years to avoid paying taxes on it. After traveling to Geneva to inspect the work, she’s surprised to find the crate empty. Another thread concerns painter Ryan Vaunt, who once painted Conrad’s portrait, and who’s preparing to make a commissioned portrait of shipping magnate Anders Laerp. Rose playfully teases out echoes between the abstract language used to describe conceptual art and global corporations (Laerp’s company claims to offer “robust, high-performance links to the AI-powered Internet of Things”). The chapters are further tied together by a dream shared by each of the characters of a ship on fire, an image that turns out to be central to the novel’s dizzying conclusion. It’s a diverting literary puzzle. (Aug.)