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By Lauren Wilkinson
ALICE KNOTTBy Blake Butler
Blake Butler’s fourth novel opens with a surreal scene, caught on video, in which a real piece of art is being systematically obliterated: Two anonymous figures remove Willem de Kooning’s painting “Woman III” from a wall, and a third incinerates it with a flamethrower as an audience looks on. The painting has been stolen from an heiress, Alice Knott, who is initially bewildered as to why anyone would commit such a violent act of vandalism.
The story then pivots to Alice’s bizarre childhood, or what she remembers of it. She has distinct memories of a family consisting of a mother, a father and herself. One day this suddenly and inexplicably changes when the father disappears, “without any form of friction at all, any blight beyond where Alice herself felt it — not her mother, no one else. The man had simply completely ceased appearing anywhere, as far as Alice knew, including in others’ memory but hers, or any trace of evidence he’d ever been.” Eventually, a new family imposes itself on Alice, this one including the same mother, a different father and a new twin brother.
The physical state of her childhood home isn’t fixed either: Its size, furnishings and dimensions are in flux. The fact that neither Alice’s family nor their house can be depended on to stay the same is, I think, meant to obliterate any and all feelings of comfort that the idea of home or family might provide the protagonist or us, the readers.
(Also: Alice’s twin grows up to be a serial killer. That may feel like an alarming bit of news to present as an afterthought, but I do think it speaks to the nature and scope of this book that I almost forgot to mention it.)
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