Alice Knott

May 4, 2020
Butler (300,000,000) unwinds a vertiginous, deeply interior tale of art vandalism and a woman’s derangement. When a video showing the destruction of a Willem de Kooning painting goes viral, copycat crimes erupt across the world. The de Kooning, among other destroyed works, turns out to have been stolen from Alice Knott, an aging heiress isolated in her family home for decades. Traumatized by her childhood, Alice suffers from extreme dissociation and is bewildered by herself and her mother, father, stepfather, and twin (or “untwin”) brother. Her confusion extends even to the nature of her house, which shape-shifts in her mind (“there always seemed to be new rooms, and different dimensions to the past ones”). As Alice becomes a suspect in the crimes, Alice Novak, a conceptual artist Butler confusingly describes as Alice Knott’s doppelgänger, dies, apparently during a performance. Meanwhile, acts of art-terror proliferate along with a pandemic of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease; natural disasters; and a contagious delirium that infects even the U.S. president. Butler’s penchant for ambiguities flowers in Alice’s convoluted ruminations, which predominate in this challenging novel. Unfortunately, the labyrinthine language will leave readers trapped alongside Alice in her harrowing hall-of-mirrors self, unmoored to any grounding context, and Butler’s attempt to portray mental illness is overwrought and tedious. The conceit and experimentation are fascinating and admirable, but miss their mark. Agent: Bill Clegg, the Clegg Agency.

June 1, 2020
Who is Alice Knott? In this timely novel critiquing modern society, Butler (Three Hundred Million, 2014) offers many answers. Alice is a reclusive heiress with an art collection locked in the subterranean reaches of her mansion. When the vault is mysteriously breached, and a famous painting is stolen, a film of the masterpiece being destroyed goes viral. Soon copycats around the world destroy art works that span the centuries, also sharing their videos. Does a virus infecting the planet cause these actions? Is Alice the thief? The filmmaker? Is she experiencing a psychotic break? Is she a prototype of where AI may take us? Butler's inventive mind-game is a dire warning about our numbing obsession with entertainment, our degradation of the planet, how we measure the value of art and creativity, and our unanswered hunger for meaning and belief. Alice struggles to understand who she is?like most humans, but times 10?and what is real. Butler uses this complex dystopian puzzle to explore age-old existential questions made new and newly alarming by scientific advances and late-stage capitalism.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)