One More Than One: A Novel

Summary

Swept into the underbelly of mid-century unrest, an artist begins to reexamine everything he’s ever known in this piercing and hypnotic novel about art, protest, and family from the critically acclaimed author of The Fourth Child.

At the dawn of the nineteen-seventies, in an American city racked by inequality and civil unrest, Peter and his art-school classmates find solace in their friendships, in acts of protest, and in their art, created with raw materials foraged from the ruins around them.

When Peter stumbles on a bizarre scene that appears to be the aftermath of a crime, he is swept into a nighttime odyssey involving a corrupt real-estate scheme, a sinister domestic-intelligence operation, and the mysterious life and death of a pioneering young woman filmmaker. As his journey continues, and the boundaries between reality and dream become increasingly blurred, Peter and his beautiful, blighted city are seen through fresh eyes, and a new, equally risky journey opens for him.

Drawing on influences as varied as Dostoevsky’s The Double, Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, David Lynch's Lost Highway, the novels of W. G. Sebald, and Shakespeare's Macbeth, One More Than One is a shape-shifting nocturne on art-making, family, resistance, and insanity, and a bittersweet tribute to humanity’s double instinct toward creation and destruction.