THE ODYSSEY OF MRS. NAOMI BILLINGSLEY

Stevens offers a dreamlike exploration of an extraordinary woman’s relationship with her erratic therapist.

Naomi Billingsley is an eccentric older woman based, with her equally eccentric husband, known only as Mr. Billingsley, in Mayfield, somewhere in the midwestern United States. She regularly visits a therapist named Dr. Birnteller, who regards his new patient as having symptoms that fall “somewhere within the grey area between psychiatric explanation and the supernatural or mystical.” The strange occurrences surrounding her are certainly too numerous to explain away as ordinary; for example, she survives an open bullet wound on her forehead after a routine fight with her husband, who survives equally terrible injuries. At another point, she predicts her own escape from prison, which occurs due to a mysterious earthquake. Mr. Billingsley, meanwhile, slowly turns into an aquatic creature with scales. The setting is absurdist, with characters able to take a wrong turn into Central America off a U.S. highway exit. Dr. Birnteller tries different psychiatric approaches to understand the various impossibilities in the lives of Naomi and those around her; he oscillates between accepting the surreality and suggesting more rational explanations. But Naomi soon begins to suspect that her therapist might be more eccentric than her or her spouse; he holds one of their later sessions in his office astride a white horse, decked out in a suit of armor. Stevens presents a brief, if meandering, novel in which readers never get a firm sense of the characters or their motivations. Still, the title figure’s adventures are intriguing to follow and are nearly impossible to predict; indeed, each turn this story takes is a surprise. The characters are less charmingly quirky than they are incomprehensible, however, and the lines of reality are constantly blurred, such that readers will often have trouble getting their bearings. Readers will be left with far more questions than answers at the conclusion of Naomi’s tale, which many may find unsatisfying.

A lively, if befuddling, novel that will challenge even the most diligent readers.