I used to know a lot about art.

Since my oh-so-understanding parents never saw the value in letting me take art lessons as a kid (but, gosh, did I ever learn a lot from five years of having softball forced on me, letmetellyousomething), my education was chock-full of all the art electives I could get my hands on. I even added a fine-arts minor to my collegiate studies, which really meant that I stuffed my five-pound schedule with ten pounds of art-history classes. As much as I love art and talking about it, I don't have many opportunities to flex my art-education muscles nowadays, so I'd assumed that I'd forgotten a lot more than I'd retained.

But maybe I ought to give my memory more props because the art jokes that Christopher Moore liberally sprinkled throughout "Sacre Bleu" made one of my favorite author's newest offering even more hilarious than any story with an impressive body count has any right to be. Or maybe my rusty recall was beneficial in that I wasn't getting all offended by Moore's creative liberties? Either way, gems like "Hey, Whistler, how's you mother?" and a chapter titled "The Last Seurat" had me trying to hide my snorts of laughter, lest my coworkers wonder if my brand of crazy is as harmless as it appears.

One of my favorite things about Moore is his ability to combine lowbrow humor with high-level thinking. His novels are peppered with profanity and penises, which is understandably off-putting to people who don't embrace the joys of crassness as warmly as I do. His writing has gotten a little less zany and a little more focused (but no less original) over the years; the restraint and subtlety he exercised in books like "Lamb" and "Fool" is not unlike the approach he takes with this novel. There isn't an unnecessary detail to be found here: Every seemingly insignificant detail ties into something bigger later, every joke is either another art allusion or some well-camouflaged misdirection.

Moore respects his subjects when they have some real-life inspiration (be it reality itself or reality as it relates to the Shakespearean canon). In this case, it manifests itself with a pretty solid (if not well-researched) understanding of the 1890s art world and the parade of personalities populating it.

I just wish van Gogh was as much of a presence as the synopsis made it seem like he'd be. He was an interesting cat.



Bonus fun fact: This is the second book I've read this year that typo'd "pastries" into "pasties." Take from that what you will.