First the title: Cyan Magenta Yellow Black is not a stream of nouns that rises familiarly to mind for the average reader, but it is for Duane Einwald, the protagonist of Kevin Fenton’s deceptively profound new novel. Duane is an accomplished advertising designer in 1990s Saint Paul, Minnesota; those four colors are the backbone of a color-printing technology often abbreviated as CMYK: the K is for “key,” or “black” in printer’s jargon. Duane has channeled his abiding feeling of “lostness” in the post-Vietnam War era — cue Jim Morrison’s The Doors — into “something tamer, an obsession with the purities of design.” For him, elegant design in an inelegant world “runs so deep you could confuse it with meaning.”
Yet Duane suffers no such confusion. Instead, his malady is the paralyzing ennui of the absence of meaning. For much of the novel, design is the most joyful thing in his life, almost all he’s got. Like his boss at one workplace, he lives to “alchemize the blank page” and celebrates the pleasure of squeaking “magic markers onto paper for money.” When his new agency thrives, he says, business is so good “I was almost glad I wasn’t in a relationship. Almost.” Another feature of Duane’s lostness is knowing the emptiness of what his professional passion generates: an insipid world of ubiquitous ads. He is a creator of “what float[s] in everyone’s head.”
Fenton is a very funny writer. Choosing Christmas presents in a trendy Grand Avenue gift shop, Duane selects wrapping paper “with a jazzy neo-Bullwinkle motif . . . muted purple and orange shapes that resemble paper clips determined to self-actualize.” In the cereal aisle of a Kowalski’s grocery, he notes that the consumerism goes “up to eleven thanks to the madness of packaging . . . the animated characters, the frosted chunks and infused bursts and lacquered nuggets.”
Duane’s satiric wit defends him against much more than the vacuousness of clever product enticement. He and most of the novel’s main characters are part of a therapy group that lacks “the required focus” to be a twelve-step program; its participants are “too cooked by whatever silent scream constituted our inner lives and brought us here.” The group is led by a Jesuit-trained Vietnam veteran they call Sergeant Serenity, a man who has “clearly rented a room in the abyss.” Until recently, Duane had thought failure meant “losing the Cheese Whiz account.” Whereas failure in Serenity’s work means people sometimes put “guns in their mouths and spray walls with the inert substance of their beings.”
For all its considerable, sustaining wit, Cyan Magenta Yellow Black is never far from that silent scream. It thrums just below the novel’s vulnerable, we’re-holding-it-all-together surface. And Fenton’s characters are together. The collective intimacies of therapy construct an “additional self,” a “group mind” among three leading characters that helps account for CMYB’s cohesive tones and, to borrow a phrase one of them uses to describe Seinfeld, “a wisecrack lifestyle.”
When that surface of wit and wisecracks breaks, it’s the Vietnam War that screams through the loudest. Sergeant Serenity is not the only vet in the novel. Another group member, Porter, killed people in that war but also wiped the “mess” of a “friend’s chest” from his own face in combat. We meet Porter at the end of a section with the benign title, “Love for the Wet Air and the Soft Gray Sky.” Though he is delivering pizza — the only job in the performance of which he hasn’t killed anyone — and thinking of the Magi delivering gifts to the Holy Family, Porter imagines how the Diet Cokes in his plastic delivery bag could be swung as a weapon if necessary: the hypervigilance of post-traumatic stress disorder. Then the “soft violence” of a twig breaking plunges Porter into combat mode.
It’s hard to imagine a more concise, satiric convergence of the central Christian story, vapid consumerism and that brutal, futile, shameless war. Dropping his pizza and crouching to the ground, Porter is surprised by a “projectile” that turns out to be a lost, beautiful greyhound. Later, returning the dog to its owner, Porter’s Christmas-season pleasantries reveal that the greyhound’s owner had lost a brother in Vietnam.
In the CMYK coloring process, four identical images are rendered in cyan, magenta, yellow and black, one color for each layer of acetate. Properly manipulated and aligned, the result allows for a great variety of nuanced color tones in the final image. So it is with the feeling tones that Cyan Magenta Yellow Black lays down. By turns funny, compassionate, sarcastic and profound, CMYB is properly aligned. It joins Fenton’s first novel, Merit Badges, and his memoir, Leaving Rollingstone — both set in 20th-century, rural Minnesota — to add fresh color tones to his growing body of work. The new novel’s most beautiful, more urban, colors manifest themselves in the communal generosity of Sergeant Serenity’s group, memorably dramatized when its main characters instinctively rally to support Serenity as his own PTSD crisis arises.
James McKenzie, professor emeritus of English at the University of North Dakota, lives and writes in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His most recent essay for this magazine, “Selective Memory,” appeared in the Winter 2025-26 issue. Kevin Fenton’s essays in Notre Dame Magazine include “Song for a Long Mourning.”