Bidding to join the company of the postmodern titans who dominated late-20th-century American fiction: Gaddis, Gass, DeLillo, Wallace… A hefty old-school social novel”
― Kirkus Reviews
“In this provocative epic of ideas from de Silva…the result is an original, formidable portrayal of American commerce, where everything—including one’s vision—can be bought and sold.”
―Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"Mark de Silva is high among the remnant few whose writing still justifies the writing of novels. He has earned this distinction by treating the novel not as a form but as a formative languaging of the world that spins and tilts beneath the reader."
―Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus
“The Logos is an intellectual novel not subject to intellectual clichés; a psychological novel not determined by psychological theories; a complex novel of characters not restricted to characters’ beliefs; and a masterful depiction of the search for an intellectual life not determined by intellectuality, in a time when the intellect has stopped being commonly understood as essential for social life—or even survival.”
―Germán Sierra, author of The Artifact
“The Logos is a seance, a conjuring of unbodily plasmas, blackbox TV metaphysics for the word-made-without-commentary. Flaring outward from a collective dreamwork into the shape of things to come, The Logos is autoluminescent realism transacted at godspeed, in Panavision. Its truth is the obsequious banality of an infinite soap opera, reeling out the testaments, loop-ing and branching through countless subplots, ad-breaks, sales pitches, product placements, only to lead inevitably back to that perennial cave, Platonistic cinematheque— its resident mirror-gang armed with oxygen masks and image duplicators, waiting on the far side of the psychic screen for you, the literal voyeur, to summon them.”
―Louis Armand, author of The Combinations
“Mark de Silva's The Logos stands with some of the best novels of the century: The Known World, Middle C, and A Naked Singularity. It's a dark mountain with vertiginous switchbacks-it quests to ask why we "love" those who use us, those who feast on our souls.”
―Greg Gerke, author of See What I See
2022-08-17
An artist’s modern-day Faustian bargain, rendered in granular detail.
De Silva’s second novel is narrated by a young New York painter on the rise who, as the (very lengthy) story opens, has recently lost his muse. His nuanced paintings of his now-ex have caught the eyes of wealthy collectors, but though he has acclaim, steady income is lacking. So a patron refers him to Garrett, an entrepreneur with very deep pockets who wants him to sketch ideas for some forthcoming products: glasses, whiskey, and an energy drink. The two subjects he’s assigned to observe for an ad campaign are Daphne, a rising art-film and off-Broadway actor, and Duke, an NFL rookie with massive talent but bad habits and rough friends back on Chicago’s South Side. The narrator puzzles over his new relationships with Garrett, Daphne, and Duke while pondering the Adderall-in-a-bottle qualities of the sports drink; sexual, physical, and existential drama ensues. Between its bulk, sober tone, and big themes, this novel is nakedly bidding to join the company of the postmodern titans who dominated late-20th-century American fiction: Gaddis, Gass, DeLillo, Wallace. And the book is capacious enough to fit some thoughtful philosophizing about the fuzzy line between art and money, what artists owe to the human beings they render (or is it exploit?), and the distinct virtues of writing and visual art. (The title is double-edged, referring to the ancient Greek word for word and ad symbols.) But it also has plodding, stodgy stretches where observations aren’t so much strikingly detailed as they are attenuated. (A passage where the narrator watches one of Duke’s college games runs 20 dense pages.) Tighter editing might have brought both de Silva’s intelligence and the tension of the narrator’s predicaments into sharper relief.
A hefty old-school social novel that nearly cracks under its own weight.
