Clichés exist for a reason. They have scope and are colloquially relevant. Their territory is metaphor. “Tight-knit group,” “clouds like marshmallows,” and the like are figures of speech that once resonated perhaps and have become treacly and banal with time. A cliché is often cut from drafts. Cliché’s deployment comes at the expense of precision. The ability of a writer to work over a cliché and tell a new or surprising story is rare.
Clichés happen to differ from tropes in a few important ways. Notably, genre fiction’s reliance on tropes allows for characters or plots to become vessels of imagination. In those empty spaces, writers can elaborate more complex systems of magic or science as readers have a stable hold on the general possibilities therein. What tropes accomplish is stability; clichés offer instead familiarity. That familiarity in fiction often is boring and tired. Clichés became that way over time but they have something like limits and edges. They have, one might propose, dimensions.
The artist Kevin Pace, the narrator and protagonist of Percival Everett’s 2018 novel, So Much Blue, begins there, “with dimensions.” The rest of the novel is structured by clichés. It has three storylines around the life of Pace, a middle-aged black artist and recovering alcoholic. He goes to Paris to exhibit his work and has an affair with a much younger watercolorist. He describes his home life after the secret affair, and then, his teenage daughter gets pregnant. And third, in 1979, we follow Pace on a trip to El Salvador with his friend Richard, to find Richard’s missing, drug-addict brother. The story rotates in time between these three periods in Pace’s life with short, dialogue heavy chapters.
The dialogue and descriptions are snappy—a crack addict in the 1979 section is from “central casting,” Pace recounts a “prolonged and pointedly tiring argument with some idiot from the Yale English Department.” But then we are brought back to earth with cliché. Victoire, the 22-year-old French water colorist Pace has an affair with, is introduced with “she was jazz and [he] could’ve hated her for it.” Anyone sensible recognizes this turn of phrase as particularly weak writing, a dangling and unclear metaphor. The dissonance between cliché, the explicit and often obvious characterization and tropes against the clear control Everett exerts on the novel commences with that opening line: “I will begin with dimensions.”
Everett renders Pace as a particularly stoic and quiet man. His son laments Pace’s inability to connect with the rest of the family saying he’s always “out there” in his shed working away on his secret art projects. The effect of this distance is most felt on the women in his life: Linda, his daughter April, and Victoire. Pace is a “general failure of a father,” who cannot transgress the pallid home life he’s created. Even his alcoholism, a depressant addiction to whiskey, adds to this sense of languid stillness.
His lack of action at home comes up against the other two narratives in the story. His affair in France proceeds rather casually—the younger woman pursues him and quickly they fuck. The only oddity in those sequences comes when Pace meets Victoire’s mother, Sylvie, at the mother’s request. Yet this oddity is tossed off as a bit of clichéd Frenchness: Richard and Pace toast “to the French” after meeting Sylvie. The 1979 section then equally presents the reader with bland drama: a mercenary named the Bummer and a rehash of violence in El Salvador that works as a Kevin Pace origin story. The attempt of this third of the novel is to elucidate the other types of secrets that Pace keeps from his wife and not to explain why those secrets are kept but to show what their content is.
Questions of why Pace does things tend to redound to cliché. He, at one point, calls himself a “dirty old artist man,” when he feels like a “cliché.” We have cultural referents of people feeling cliché so much that itself has become a cliché—a stacked cliché, the first one added onto the other with no distance between them. So Much Blue suggests that if one stares at those clichés long enough, something may rise to the surface—in this case, true love. The climactic conclusion, where Pace shows his long-suffering wife, Linda, his secret magnum opus, hidden away in a shed, contracted to be destroyed upon his death, she repeats “So much blue” three times, perhaps one for each of the three storylines. Pace, we are told, doesn’t use blue in his work, and when pressed, falls back, retreats: he’d become “anti-jargon, even anti-intellectual.” He wants art derived from a place of “innocence, naivete…of pure mind.” Blue, with its obvious cliché “feeling blue” to mean sad (a stray thought had me in Jose Esteban Muñoz territory of “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down”), but then also it contains softness, a cooling feeling, a reminder perhaps of the sea or the sky, of possibility and adventure. These things for Pace are not “of pure mind.”
Two small bits of dialogue offer insight into Pace’s inability to see through to the world a “pure mind.” His grandfather pointedly asks “‘do any roads lead home from irony’” upon evaluating some of his paintings. And in Paris, as he lies in bed deciding whether or not to sleep with Victoire, he hears rain, not really rain but “an abstraction of rain.” Abstractions are impure, just like irony. Clichés are pure, perhaps even innocent. They are cozy, just like the color blue. Abstractions are stark and harsh—intellectual, jargon addled. Cliché protects Pace from the realities of his wife and family’s emotions. His reliance on the tired comfort of long won and commonplace notions of his place in the world reveals how abstract of a character he is. No “real” man would behave as consistently along the nodes of a masculine plot of self-discovery. There would be more tension, anguish, and melodrama; for life does in fact have these things even if one could tell a story of life without them. The problem then becomes that Kevin Pace isn’t real in any sense of the word. He is a character, intentionally flat and necessarily abstract.
Why doesn’t he, then, have dimensions? Cliché comes under attack in art for being flat, without scope or, yes, dimension. By piling them on top of each other, like one would stack paper, even a novel, Everett gives cliché itself dimensions and particularity. Pace is a man who understands little metaphorically or abstractly, but he does understand materials, the hard stuff of life. He understands that his canvas is “twelve feet high and twenty-one feet and three inches across.” He cannot explain the “three inches.” They’re trouble for Pace because they’re hangers on, leftovers, a remainder in division. They are the types of things chopped off to streamline workflow and make the precision of art exact, much like cliché is revised out of writing.
One read of the reliance on cliché could be that The Novel as it exists is dead. However, in spite of that cliché itself, the evidence for that read is slim. Another could be a test of a sort of identity politics in literature: are these clichés still such even when enacted by a black character? When a black American jaunts down to Latin America and on his return the CIA attempts to recruit him, does it still contain the same tired force as when a white character goes native to find himself? Does critique bubble to the surface instead? Taking a longer view of Everett’s work, which parodies clean lines between subaltern identity and self-evident critique (Erasure, The Trees, Dr. No, A History of the African People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond as Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid), So Much Blue perhaps offers something more slanted than a simple taxonomy can abide. It is part critique, part play, part domestic drama, and yes, part cliché. The reader is then challenged to hold all of these things at once in their mind, to “trust the author,” as the cliché goes. A more reliable read of the tensions, comes from the slow boiling literary and interpersonal dramas, which finds the work extravagant and beautiful much like how one would adore a painting. Through relaxed and steady engagement, So Much Blue becomes not a novel of cliché exactly, but a cliché of cliché, a thing removed from itself again and again. Cliché loosens the chains of clear representation. It abstracts our notions of what can be compelling storytelling. Bizarrely, this gives the whole work a specific concreteness. By moving away from the metaphorical weakness of cliché, Everett provides a harsh reality. Pace is lazy because he’s lazy. He’s a bad husband because he’s a bad husband. X equals X. The material of life is real, even if an artist may stay stuck in his head or out in his shed. There is so much blue because there must be! So much blue, so much blue.