Super Host - Hardcover

Russo, Kate

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593187709 ISBN 13: 9780593187708

Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

“Get ready to smile….[A] sweet story and the perfect antidote to the chaos that’s been 2021.” –the Skimm 

A deeply funny and shrewdly observed debut novel about being lost in the very place you know by heart.

Bennett Driscoll is a Turner Prize-nominated artist who was once a rising star. Now, at age fifty-five, his wife has left him, he hasn't sold a painting in two years, and his gallery wants to stop selling his work, claiming they'll have more value retrospectively...when he's dead. So, left with a large West London home and no income, he's forced to move into his artist's studio in the back garden and list his house on the popular vacation rental site, AirBed.

A stranger now in his own home, with his daughter, Mia, off at art school, and any new relationships fizzling out at best, Bennett struggles to find purpose in his day-to-day. That all changes when three different guests--lonely American Alicia; tortured artist Emma; and cautiously optimistic divorcée Kirstie--unwittingly unlock the pieces of himself that have been lost to him for too long.

Warm, witty, and utterly humane, Super Host offers a captivating portrait of middle age, relationships, and what it truly means to take a new chance at life.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kate Russo grew up in Maine but now divides her time between there and the United Kingdom. She has an MFA in painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, and exhibits in both the UK and the US.

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The Demons You're Stuck With

In the hierarchy of linen stains, blood is at the top. Everyone thinks semen is the worst, but they're wrong. They only think this because of that popular TV show where inspectors take a black light to a hotel room and it lights up neon yellow, indicating bodily fluids all over the bedding. Since that report, people automatically throw off the bedspread in hotel rooms, assuming it's drenched in some stranger's spunk. It probably is; that's why Bennett Driscoll prefers to use duvet covers in his rentable four-bedroom house. Soap, hot water, and a rigorous spin cycle will scrub all the manhood out of a duvet cover. It's the stains you can detect with the naked eye that are the real problem. When Bennett throws back the duvets on checkout day, it's the sight of blood he fears most.

Fuck.

And there they are, halfway down the fitted sheet. Only a couple drops' worth, but on Bennett's bright white sheets they stand out like a red scarf discarded in snow. Their removal will require bleach and a lot of scrubbing. Recently, he bought a nailbrush or, for his purposes, a blood brush, to combat the really stubborn stains. In the beginning, he would just throw away the visibly soiled sheets and buy new ones, but now a year into renting out his suburban London house on AirBed, he has thrown away five sets of perfectly good sheets. Bleach is cheaper. He pulls the fitted sheet up from the corners, wadding it into a ball in the center of the bed. If the blood has transferred onto the mattress pad, that's double the work.

Dammit.

Recently, Bennett was awarded the status of "Super Host" on the AirBed website-an honor he earned for having a quick response rate and excellent reviews. Though it's never been his aspiration to become a host, he'd be lying if he said that the little medal next to his picture didn't fill him with pride. Until two years ago, Bennett was a full-time artist who never stuttered over answering the question, "What do you do?" In fact, nobody ever needed to ask him. He was the well-known painter, Bennett Driscoll. Everyone knew that. Okay, maybe not everyone, but enough people that he didn't have to worry about renting out his house to tourists. Unfortunately, things change, tastes change. It used to be that anything he painted would sell. In 2002, there was a waiting list. Now, sixteen years later, there are more than a hundred of his paintings in storage. His last solo show was in 2013. The critic for the Guardian wrote, "Driscoll cares so little for the current trends in painting that one wonders if he concerns himself with the contemporary art world at all." That pissed Bennett off, mostly because it was true. But a bad review is better than no review, he realizes that now. Since art critics don't review his work anymore, Bennett pores over each AirBed review as though it's the Sunday Times, scouring each for a new and nuanced understanding of his hosting skills. More often than not, they go like this: "Bennett was a welcoming and gracious host," "Bennett was very helpful," "Bennett has a beautiful home," and "Looking forward to staying at Bennett's house again the next time we're in London." They're not exactly Times quality, but nevertheless, it's nice to be reviewed favorably. Hey, it's nice to be reviewed, full stop. Sometimes he wonders if his ex-wife, Eliza, ever goes on AirBed to read his reviews. Probably not. She left a year ago to live in America with a hedge fund manager named Jeff, taking with her the steady salary from her publishing job that, until the divorce, had been paying their bills. That's when Bennett decided to move into the studio at the end of the garden and rent out the family home on AirBed. He doesn't think his Super Host status would impress Eliza. Almost nothing impressed her. He wishes someone would write, "Bennett has a beautiful home. He was the perfect host. No, the perfect man-exciting, interesting, and handsome in equal measure. He would make an excellent husband. I even bought several of his paintings because I believe they are the pinnacle of contemporary art." No such luck yet.

As he rounds the corner from the bedroom to the hallway, hip-hop is quietly thumping in the distance from the other side of the house. He carries the big wad of sheets down the wide staircase, careful to peer ahead of him from the side of the load. As he walks through the large, open-plan living space, the music grows louder. Bennett sings along confidently, although he canÕt quite bring himself to rap the lyrics. Instead, the words always come out melodically, each one dragging on a millisecond longer than it should. He discovered rap music around the same time he started letting the house, around the same time Eliza moved out. Though unable to name a single song, she claimed to hate hip-hop.

On the night he discovered the rapper Roots Manuva, he'd been out to dinner with his daughter. They were at some trendy Shoreditch restaurant, the kind of place that claims to sell street food, but in the comfort of the indoors. The music was, of course, too loud-he knew that even without Eliza there to point it out. He had to shout to be heard, which was difficult considering the task at hand was explaining to Mia why her mother had just fucked off to New York. At one point, Mia, needing to collect herself, went to the ladies' room. He hated the idea of his daughter crying alone in a stall, but he sat patiently, fighting the urge to follow her into the women's loo and check on her. At the time he was one of the few people on earth for whom the mobile phone wasn't an obvious distraction. Why pull out your phone unless you needed to make a phone call? Instead, in need of entertainment, he started listening intently to the restaurant's music:

Taskmaster burst the bionic zit-splitter

Breakneck speed we drown ten pints of bitter

We lean all day and some say that ain't productive

But that depend upon the demons that you're stuck with

He had no idea what a "bionic zit-splitter" was (he still doesn't), but something about how we "lean all day," and "the demons that you're stuck with" resonated.

"I can't stand still with you anymore," Eliza had said two weeks previously. Divorce papers had since been served. He was now doing his best to explain to his then eighteen-year-old daughter something even he couldn't understand himself. Had he been standing still for the last twenty years and not realized it? Their whole marriage, he thought he was being reliable-a good father and husband. That's what women wanted, right? Reliability? Wait. He should be asking women what they want, not assuming. Eliza was forever pointing that out. His own father was anything but reliable. Well, that's not strictly true, he was reliably drunk all the time-a miserable man who was only happy when he was listing all the ways you'd wronged him. Bennett was happy, or so he thought. He loved being an artist. He loved Eliza and Mia with all his heart. Why not stand still? Where else would he want to go? Eliza thought he was stuck. "The demons that you're stuck with . . ." What were these demons that destroyed his marriage and why hadn't he noticed them? This was what he was pondering when Mia returned to the table.

"What is this song?" he asked her.

A die-hard Father John Misty fan, she just shrugged in ignorance as she sat down.

"Excuse me?" Bennett stopped a server moving quickly by with a plate of Mexican grilled corncobs. "Can you tell me what this song is?"

Mia, embarrassed, put her face in her hands.

"Roots Manuva, 'Witness,'" the girl said, her tone implying Duh.

Bennett pulled out the little black notebook he kept in his blazer pocket and wrote down Routes Maneuver. Witness. He had...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593187709
• ISBN 13: 9780593187708
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar