Blue Boy
Blue Boy tells the story of an art historian with gargantuan ambition and hubris. A greedy tyrant, Gabriel Rhab regards most of the people around him, family and colleagues included, as existing to serve him, though, unfortunately, they have their own ambitions and appetites, which sometimes get in the way. Though a satire, the story offers both fun and empathy, as the intensely inward-gazing world of academic rivalry, the sadness of art history, the futility of theory, and the ludic aspects of domestic life are explored from various points of view with hard intelligence and psychological depth.
“Not since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf has a writer given us such an intense, provocative, and poetic look at the tensions between art and marriage, illusion and reality. Jean McGarry’s Blue Boy is as heartbreakingly beautiful as a pieta by an Old World master.”
“It’s delicious, so delicious. Wickedly sharp and funny and flat-out beautiful.”
“Professor Gabriel Rhab, éminence grise, art historian of serious renown with a slew of books to press home the point, is cosseted by his fame from criticism, attack, even legitimate intellectual probing...until he isn’t. In academia, there is often a strain of viciousness surprising in a profession where no one tends to die and where the stakes are often occult to a larger world. Blue Boy is a fascinating dive into the greatness, the hallowed halls, and the rancor.”
“Jean McGarry squeezes a heightened reality-a truthfulness, a naturalness-out of her flair for the strange and the bizarre...she shows us that the truth is crazy. A wild ride of a book.”