Self-Portrait with Boy

December 4, 2017
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.

September 15, 2018

"I'll tell you how it started," Lyon's extraordinary debut promises. "With a simple, tragic accident...and a photograph." A boy is dead after tumbling off the roof of his Brooklyn apartment building. His descent is unintentionally caught on film by the artist living in the loft below. The tragedy transforms Self-Portrait #400 into spectacular, unforgettable, unforgivable art. Lu is the epitome of the hungry young New York artist, working multiple dead-end jobs for minimal sustenance, sinking all available resources to the creation of her oeuvre. As the building residents rally around the shocked, grieving parents, Lu finds herself achingly drawn to mourning mother Kate. Lu's need for intimate friendship and her obsession with public validation of her work (not to mention a paycheck) cannot possibly coexist; her decision regarding the fate of her masterpiece photograph will understandably have irrevocable consequences. Julia Whelan keeps the tension palpable through the almost ten hours of heightened narration, enhancing Lyon's already raw, searing story. VERDICT Savvy readers of incandescent debuts involving young children--think Samantha Schweblin's Fever Dream, Lidia Yuknavitch's The Small Backs of Children, Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere--will also find hauntingly satisfying resonance here. ["A powerful, brilliantly imagined story not easily forgotten; highly recommended": LJ 2/1/18 review of the Scribner hc.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

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