Waxing Patriotic

This is a curious novel with a lot of moving parts which are coordinated well. Like Don DeLillo’s Underworld and Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, it uses a scheme of East versus West and is concerned with—to use the most helpfully vague terms—the way that art and politics are related. It follows on from Russo’s previous novel Vivienne (published by Arcade in 2024), and places at its center Vivienne’s granddaughter Vesta, who is also an artist. She may be at the center, in her home in rural Pennsylvania, but that is not where the reader spends most of his or her time: the novel starts with Dean Konig, a member of an art collective in the Mojave Desert with whom Vesta videochats, and then switches to Vesta’s artist mother, Velour, who discovers a colony of bats in her attic.