The love triangle between Louisa, Karina, and Preston is fraught and frenetic, all three such different artists who, again, operate as sirens and muses for each other in turns (Angress is a maestro of chaotic characters and the novel does indeed fit very neatly into the “disaster bisexual canon” of literature that she coined a couple weeks ago). But Karina’s also tangled up with Preston Utley, an anti-capitalist edgelord who focuses more on his surreal digital art blog than on his Wrynn coursework. Louisa is drawn to Karina, and the two begin a fraught, undefinable relationship that blurs lines between art and desire. This is not at all the situation for her roommate Karina Piontek, daughter of art collectors and a big name on campus because of her family’s status and also because of a much-gossiped-about moment in her recent past. Louisa Arceneaux, a student at Wrynn from Louisiana, stretches her own canvases and skips meals to save money as, even with her scholarship, the expensive world of Wrynn remains inaccessible to her. The novel is told in four alternating perspectives: Louisa, Karina, Preston, and Robert. As three of the four main characters come of age and come into their artistic visions and styles (and the fourth reevaluates his life and motivations and inspirations in a classic Artist’s Midlife Crisis), they’re significantly impacted by the outside world, by class, by other’s perceptions of who they are and who they should be, by the agonizing quest to make art that is not only meaningful but profitable. The art world becomes a mystifying place where business and art are inseparable and often contradictory forces.
Set in 2011 - on the campus of an elite arts college called Wrynn for the first half and then in New York City for the second - Sirens & Muses is backdropped by the Occupy movement, themes of capitalism and political art permeating the narrative. Art and the making of it carries so many emotional, political, and symbolic layers, and Sirens & Muses makes those underpinnings beneath the surface of art its main source of character and relationship development to great effect.
Angress paints a world suffused with flawed and distinct characters often undone by their own ambition, insecurity, and the capitalist trappings of the art world. Art becomes the way characters connect but also hurt each other. Collaborating on art becomes a sensuous act. They tempt each other, desire each other, inspire each other, question themselves, their art, their relationships with one another. In Sirens & Muses, a confident and captivating debut novel from Antonia Angress, characters take turns being sirens and muses - sometimes embodying both at once.
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