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Summary
Summary
Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
A compulsively readable and electrifying debut about an ambitious young female artist who accidentally photographs a boy falling to his death--an image that could jumpstart her career, but would also devastate her most intimate friendship.
Lu Rile is a relentlessly focused young photographer struggling to make ends meet. Working three jobs, responsible for her aging father, and worrying that the crumbling warehouse she lives in is being sold to developers, she is at a point of desperation. One day, in the background of a self-portrait, Lu accidentally captures on film a boy falling past her window to his death. The photograph turns out to be startlingly gorgeous, the best work of art she's ever made. It's an image that could change her life...if she lets it.
But the decision to show the photograph is not easy. The boy is her neighbors' son, and the tragedy brings all the building's residents together. It especially unites Lu with his beautiful grieving mother, Kate. As the two forge an intense bond based on sympathy, loneliness, and budding attraction, Lu feels increasingly unsettled and guilty, torn between equally fierce desires: to use the photograph to advance her career, and to protect a woman she has come to love.
Set in early 90s Brooklyn on the brink of gentrification, Self-Portrait with Boy is a provocative commentary about the emotional dues that must be paid on the road to success, a powerful exploration of the complex terrain of female friendship, and a brilliant debut from novelist Rachel Lyon.
Author Notes
Rachel Lyon's short stories have appeared in Joyland, Iowa Review, and Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, among other publications. She attended Princeton and Indiana University, where she was fiction editor for Indiana Review. Rachel teaches creative writing at Sackett Street Writers Workshop, Catapult, and other institutions, and is cofounder of the reading series Ditmas Lit. Self-Portrait With Boy is her first novel. Visit RachelLyon.work.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Lyon's candid, adroit debut follows a young artist's disturbing journey to find an audience. Lu Rile is a photographer squatting in a clapped-out industrial building in gritty 1990s Brooklyn. While staging a self-portrait, she accidentally captures a boy falling to his death outside her window. Although she has shot hundreds of images, this photograph is different, perfect. The boy's tragic death creates a close community among the building's tenants, mostly artists, and Lu becomes the confidant of Kate, the boy's mother, who lives upstairs. Lu struggles to make ends meet and to find a gallery to represent her work, neglecting all along to tell Kate about her brilliant photograph. She manages to place it in an upcoming group exhibition in which Kate's husband, Steve, also has a work, and tension mounts. Exacerbating Lu's uncertainty about whether she is doing the right thing, she believes the ghost of the child is appearing at same window from which she captured him falling. But even this is not enough to push her to confess to his mother or pull the photograph from the show. Written in raw, honest prose, this is an affecting and probing moral tale about an artist choosing to advance her work at the expense of her personal relationships. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Lu Rile is a struggling photographer working a series of minimum-wage jobs to pay for film and the rent for her loft in a converted warehouse in early 1990s New York City. As an artistic exercise, she challenges herself to create a self-portrait a day. Self-Portrait #400, taken in front of her window, accidentally includes a child falling to his death from the building's roof. Lu is horrified by the photo but also immediately recognizes that it is the best work she has ever made. Intending to show it to the boy's parents and seek their permission to share the image, she instead finds herself becoming a confidante to his mother, Kate, and supporting her as her marriage unravels under the weight of grief. Through Kate, Lu secures an opportunity to exhibit the photo and launch her career, but doing so will mean destroying their friendship. In her gripping first novel, Lyon sympathetically portrays Lu's struggle to make this impossible decision and to deal with its repercussions.--Harmon, Lindsay Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Lu Rile, a photographer and the feisty narrator of this debut novel, looks back to the most important moment in her career. In 1991, 26-year-old Lu is a poor artist working at a minimum-wage job and living uncomfortably in a dilapidated loft in one of Brooklyn's seediest industrial neighborhoods. One day, while taking the 400th in a series of self-portraits, Lu accidentally captures, in the background, the figure of a boy falling to his death from the roof of her building. This is Max, the 9-year-old son of her upstairs neighbors, a painter named Steve and his wife, Kate. The moment she sees the developed photograph Lu also sees her future. For it is a masterpiece, if Lu does say so herself, which she does, very often, and with such persuasive persistence that she succeeds in placing it in an upcoming exhibition at a major gallery - an exhibition that will also include work by Steve. But how will Lu's artistic appropriation of their tragic loss affect Max's parents, in particular fragile Kate, with whom, during this period of mourning, Lu has developed an intimate friendship? So obvious and so troubling is the answer to this question that Lu cannot bring herself to reveal the existence of the photograph until the gallery opening takes place. Meanwhile, Max has started to haunt Lu in the form of a ghost, visiting her regularly in her loft. Lu decides this, too, must be kept secret from his parents. Like the cops to whom Lu ends up telling her story, I found myself flinching at the supernatural parts. The ghost's role undercuts the novel's seriousness, and Lu's attempt to fit it into an explanation for certain developments is not just tortured but unnecessary. This artist's bildungsroman has enough on its hands wrestling with complex questions about art-making, integrity and the ethics of ambition. "I don't believe there is any relationship between art and morality," Lu asserts glibly during an interview for a teaching position. These words, easy to say, will not be easy to live by.
Kirkus Review
When an ambitious young photographer captures an unthinkable tragedyand creates an accidental masterpiece in the processshe is forced to make a choice that will define her future.Thick with the atmospheric grime of early 1990s New York, Lyon's haunting debut hinges on a single instant: the moment when recent art school graduate Lu Rile, broke and ruthless, sets up her camera for a self-portraitthe 400th in her seriesand captures, by chance, the image of a little boy falling from the sky. The boy is Max Schubert-Fine, the 9-year-old son of Lu's upstairs neighbors, and now he is dead, having slipped off the roof of their building, a crumbling Brooklyn warehouse not officially zoned for tenancy. The building's motley crew of residentsall artists; who else could live there?come together in the aftermath of the tragedy, rallying around Max's beautiful mother, Kate, and offering Lu, until now a loner, something like community. In the weeks that follow, Kate and Lu form an intense and complicated friendship, united in loneliness, held together by a flicker of unspoken attraction. But Lu doesn't tell Kate about the photograph of her son falling, the photograph that couldthat willfundamentally change the course of Lu's career, offering her an escape from both poverty and obscurity, a name and a paycheck. (God knows Lu, whose father is ailing, needs the money.) From its first sentences, the novel is hurtling toward its inevitable and nauseating conclusion as Lu chooses between her friendship and her art, a choice that wasn't ever really a choice at all. More than a book about art, or morality, it is a book about time: Lyon captures the end of an era. Lu, after this, for better and worse, will never be the person she was before the photograph. And as the warehouses get developed and the rents rise, the city won't ever be the same, either.Fearless and sharp. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
DEBUT While taking her self-portrait for the 400th time, photographer Lu Rile captures the very moment that her neighbors' young son Max falls to his death. When she enlarges the image, his blond curls and untied shoelaces are clearly depicted in the background. At the artists' loft in New York City where they live, all the neighbors unite to comfort grieving parents Kate and Steve, and Lu becomes close to Kate. She confides to Kate that Max haunts her, making tapping sounds on the glass and that sometimes she sees the image of his intact body coming through the window. Lu considers her photograph a masterpiece and with ruthless determination has it shown at a nearby gallery without telling Kate and Steve of her plan. "Self-Portrait with Boy" is a big hit, gaining favorable attention from the art world, but Lu's actions create awful repercussions. VERDICT Fabulously written, this spellbinding debut novel is a real page-turner. A powerful, brilliantly imagined story not easily forgotten; highly recommended.-Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
