The Painter is a post-modern, avant-garde, surrealist novel about the lives of a group of painters, their friends, and their wealthy benefactors as they grapple with existential crises that threaten their very identities. While these crises approach, the people in the novel struggle to process their relationships and their realities, creating conflicts between who they thought they were as well as with the people that they thought they knew. Meanwhile, with these dramas playing out, an ongoing narrative on AI told using humanoid and animal robots brings a modern layer to the novel that feels prescient as much as it’s technically insightful. In the end, the people in the story are changed by how they respond to the story’s events, with one person falling into danger in the final pages in a sequence that will leave you breathless.