A surreal story bridges historical trauma with existential nightmares.
Olsen’s latest novel begins in recognizable terrain before branching into increasingly expansive, experimental spaces. It opens in Berlin in 1933, when a girl named Edie Metzger—not quite 3 years old—is taken by her parents in the night to a massive book burning. Olsen opts for a fragmentary approach here, juxtaposing the innocence of young Edie, who doesn’t understand what’s happening—“those men over there are grilling books, which means everyone will get to sample some soon”—with other onlookers who embrace or shun fascism. There are echoes of Olsen’s My Red Heaven (2020), set in Berlin a few years before this, but soon, the setting leaps forward in time and across an ocean to New York City. In a series of fragmentary passages, a narrator who is revealed to be Edith Metzger chronicles her (real-life) friendship with Ruth Kligman and their encounters with Jackson Pollock, all leading up to the fateful car accident that killed both Metzger and Pollock. The novel’s second half takes things into an increasingly stranger realm, following other versions of Edie/Edith, including a man named Eddy, a woman named Edda, and a child onboard the Lusitania as it sinks. Olsen juxtaposes the miraculous and uncanny with moments that emphasize more mundane concerns. This is a world where, in the face of the potentially supernatural, “the event slowly bleached away into the informational background, superseded by what seemed more pressing quotidian concerns from school shootings to the price of milk.” It’s not always an easy read, but Olsen depicts the horrors of history and more speculative anxieties with equal power.
Impossible to classify, this novel raises big questions about memory and identity.