Tuesday Nights in 1980

First-time novelist Prentiss vividly conjures a colorful love triangle set in the gritty, art-soaked world of downtown New York in 1980. Raul Engales is a painter throwing himself into the scene as a means to escape his past in Argentina, where war has cast everything into shadow. James Bennett is an up-and-coming art critic with an overwhelming gift: synesthesia: “an image was manufactured into a bodily sensation... applesauce tasted like sadness and winter was the color blue.” The fulcrum is Lucy Olliason, a naive beauty from Idaho, drawn to New York by a postcard of the skyline she found on the side of the road. Prentiss shines when showing us James’s powers of perception. Impressive, too, is her ability to create an atmosphere that crackles with possibility as well as foreboding. She sprinkles verisimilitude throughout the SoHo scene—Laurie Anderson sings at a party at Raul’s squat; Lucy spies Keith Haring tagging a subway station; news of “Jean-Michel” and his neologistic SAMO tags are everywhere and nowhere, a spectral presence imprinting on Raul’s psyche. Structured over a year beset by tragedy, the story belongs to the two great men, artist and critic; Lucy’s beauty is her most distinguishing characteristic. One yearns for more time spent on the women artists who are minor characters, James’s magnanimous wife, Marge, and Lucy’s sometime roommate. Nevertheless, this is a bold and auspicious debut. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME Entertainment. (Apr.)