Four 14-year-olds have a summer to remember, with friends, bullies, and dysfunctional families. One becomes a famous artist. 25 years later, the artist gifts a foster child a priceless painting. A beautiful novel of art, love, and friendship.
C. Jat is a 14-year-old artist who, after heroic encouragement by his friends, becomes famous. When he dies at 39, he gives his most valuable painting to “one of us,” Louisa (18), who grew up in foster care. Ted cares for the artists and is responsible for transferring the painting to Louisa. Louisa and Ted travel back to the artist’s neighborhood, while Ted recounts the 25-year-old adventures of the four friends. The other two friends are Joar and Ali. The summer, the travels, and the discussion unveil truths about art, love, and friendship.
QUOTES
On rich people: Around the men and women, waitstaff in white shirts circulate,
serving hors d’oeuvres, because rich people love tiny food. Everything else
should be big, except for taxes and sandwiches.
Fear of swimming: Her mother had drunk herself to death. Drowned from the inside. A child’s brain is so imaginative. Louisa heard this but didn’t grow up afraid of alcohol, just horribly afraid of swimming.
The summer without boredom: It managed to be love and friendship, miraculously loud laughter, and magnificently stupid decisions. They put fireworks in mailboxes, rode shopping carts down the steepest hill in town, and tried to dry wet socks in a toaster, because what else are you supposed to do when you’re fourteen? Die of boredom?
On getting old: You know you’re old when you have to use soap on your head and shampoo on your ass.
Ali sleeping with a knife: He remembers her telling him she always slept with a knife under her pillow. Ted was so naive that he asked if that wasn’t dangerous, didn’t she cut herself on it while she was asleep? Ali just smiled and said that was the cutest thing she’d ever heard.
Joke: “I know a joke! My nephew told it to me yesterday! Do you want to hear it? Okay: you shouldn’t get angry with lazy people. They haven’t done anything!”
Libraries: “In a library. You don’t have to put up with reality there. It’s as if thousands of strangers have given away their imaginary friends, they’re sitting on the shelves and calling to you as you walk past. There’s an author called Donna Tartt who describes why a person falls in love with art: ‘It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes, you.’ That’s what libraries feel like for me.”
Art just needs friends: Art doesn’t require training, dear child, art just needs friends.” Then she crouched down in front of his painting, and when she saw the skulls next to his name, she sobbed so hard that no one really knew what to do.
One of us: So Louisa tells him everything: about a teenager in an alleyway and a painting on the wall of a building. She tells him about the speed a heart can beat at, which no one who’s stopped being young can remember. She talks on and on, and Ted listens, and Heaven leans closer to the roof of the house to hear. Louisa tells him about art so beautiful that just seeing it makes you too big for your body, a sort of happiness so overwhelming that it’s almost unbearable. “When I was standing in front of that painting, I forgot to be alone, I forgot to be afraid, do you understand?” she says. Of course Ted understands. If you’ve experienced it once, you never forget it. If not, there probably isn’t any way to explain. “If that artist is one of us, really one of us, you have to do whatever you can to help,” he says. “I know,” she says proudly.
Chapter 27 introduces Basquiat, who might be the inspiration for the book. “Basquiat first achieved notoriety in the late 1970s as part of the graffiti duo SAMO, alongside Al Diaz. By the early 1980s, his paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. At 22, he became one of the youngest to exhibit at the Whitney Biennial in New York. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his artwork in 1992. In 2017, Untitled, a 1982 painting depicting a black skull with red-and-yellow rivulets, sold for a record-breaking $110.5 million, becoming one of the most expensive paintings ever purchased.”
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