"An intoxicating Manhattan fairy tale...As affecting as it is absorbing.
A thrilling debut." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "A vital,
sensuous, edgy, and suspenseful tale of longing, rage, fear, compulsion,
and love." --Booklist (starred review) A transcendent debut novel that
follows a critic, an artist, and a desirous, determined young woman as
they find their way--and ultimately collide--amid the ever-evolving New
York City art scene of the 1980s.Welcome to SoHo at the onset of the
eighties: a gritty, not-yet-gentrified playground for artists and
writers looking to make it in the big city. Among them: James Bennett, a
synesthetic art critic for the New York Times whose unlikely condition
enables him to describe art in profound, magical ways, and Raul Engales,
an exiled Argentinian painter running from his past and the Dirty War
that has enveloped his country. As the two men ascend in the downtown
arts scene, dual tragedies strike, and each is faced with a loss that
acutely affects his relationship to life and to art. It is not until
they are inadvertently brought together by Lucy Olliason--a small town
beauty and Raul's muse--and a young orphan boy sent mysteriously from
Buenos Aires, that James and Raul are able to rediscover some semblance
of what they've lost. As inventive as Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The
Goon Squad and as sweeping as Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings, Tuesday
Nights in 1980 boldly renders a complex moment when the meaning and
nature of art is being all but upended, and New York City as a whole is
reinventing itself. In risk-taking prose that is as powerful as it is
playful, Molly Prentiss deftly explores the need for beauty, community,
creation, and love in an ever-changing urban landscape.
