It’s the summer of 2012, and after 25 years the cast of Paul Russell’s critically acclaimed first novel The Salt Point reconvene for a radiant and disturbing weekend in the Hudson Valley. Anatole is getting married to his boyfriend of 12 years. Lydia is now the mother of a captivating 17 year old. Having worked as a private military contractor in Iraq, Chris has returned to the US for the first time in many years. And no one knows whatever happened to the beloved, legendary Leigh, “Our Boy of the Mall”—until Chris, who hates unfinished business, decides to track him down. These once-close friends have not only lost touch with each other, some have also lost their way. Moving, at times shocking, and always memorable, Immaculate Blue exposes those moments when the personal and the political come together to shape our lives in unexpected ways.
Immaculate Blue
Reviews and praise for Immaculate Blue
Immaculate Blue can be read alone, and it suffers no missing pieces. Yet, read as a sequel to The Salt Point, it contains the dimensional depth of a family album: the history there, as people look at themselves, at a moment in time, when they were on their way to becoming someone else…. Years and distance hold few things intact. One cannot ask the past to reveal anything, it can only offer up its shards. You can’t ask, “Did you love me?” without the risk of hearing the answer. With Immaculate Blue, Paul Russell brings to a close four memorable friendships that loved deeply enough to always risk its often faltering arrows—they still risk it as a means of trying to stay alive. It reminds us once again why he is one of our best gay novelists exploring the nature of the heart and its resting places.
Immaculate Blue was honored as a Finalist, 2016 Lambda Literary Award
“Intense… and often devastatingly erotic…. While Immaculate Blue spends ample time in the shadows, the novel emerges as a defiant dance of life, a guiltless doubling down on sensual pleasure as the Grim Reaper edges ever nearer and middle age settles in. What simpatico souls will be at your side when you cross those thresholds, and what will they inspire you to do? Although they are deeply flawed, you could do a lot worse than the characters in Immaculate Blue” — Chronogram
Read the Chronogram review.
Praise for Paul Russell’s novels:
“Intimate and epic, gorgeously written, divinely detailed, The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov is an ingenious hybrid of a book, powerful, troubling, exciting.” — Sigrid Nunez
“The Coming Storm takes off from a sensational subject to arrive at unexpected heights and subtleties. It’s both unsettling and touching… well-nigh flawless.”—The Washington Post Book World
“Boys of Life is simply great writing — risky, honest, horrifying and insightful…. A forthright vision of love’s darkest possibilities.” — Dorothy Allison
“If Tennessee Williams were young today and a Yankee, The Salt Point is the novel he might have written. It finds the sacred and poetic even in the slag heap of small-town America.” — Edmund White
